Senior AI Engineer | Sage Home Loans

Red Ventures • Charlotte, NC

3d • $150,000 - $220,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Sage Home Loans is on a mission to revolutionize the industry by making mortgage simple. We’re re-imagining the mortgage application and origination processes around data and AI systems, and we’re hiring a Senior AI Engineer to join our Innovation team. In this role, you’ll work hands-on with cutting-edge generative AI technologies—partnering with AI engineers, software engineers, and product managers to build LLM-powered products that meaningfully change how mortgages get done. We’re looking for a builder with a bias to action who thinks like an owner, brings a growth mindset, and is energized by the chance to ship production AI in a regulated, fast-moving environment.

Requirements

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with at least 1 year building LLM-powered systems.
• BS/MS in CS, ML, or a related field preferred; equivalent applied experience welcome in lieu of a degree.
• Demonstrated experience shipping LLM-powered products to production, including hands-on work with prompt design, agent harnesses, and tool use.
• Hands-on experience building eval frameworks—benchmark design, golden dataset curation, LLM-as-judge, and regression testing for prompts and models.
• Experience selecting and integrating foundation models from multiple vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI, open-weight models), and reasoning about cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs.
• Familiarity with post-training techniques (SFT, DPO, LoRA) and RAG/retrieval system design, including embedding model selection.
• Comfort operating in a regulated/financial environment is a plus.
• Experience with end-to-end model development, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring workflows, including LLM-based products in production.
• Proficiency with a modern data platform (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar).
• Ability to methodically understand business context, define value propositions, and formulate and solve complex applied AI problems.
• Ability to clearly articulate the “why” behind proposed AI solutions to relevant stakeholders.
• Ability to own key deliverables and use problem-solving to deliver projects on time, iterating when justified by incremental value—because plan beats no plan.
• Ability to intake business requests and priorities, prioritize bodies of work, and communicate project status, timeline, and technical results to broad audiences.
• Bias to action and proactive communication—every second counts.
• Experience expanding the knowledge of an AI engineering team through teaching and mentoring on topics where you have specific expertise.
• Experience leveraging technical expertise to identify the feasibility of potential AI projects, ensuring the team delivers value on projects that are feasible.
• Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape and translates new techniques, models, and tooling into shipped product—a commitment to getting better every day.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with TypeScript/React/Node a plus, for app integration

Responsibilities

• Work with cutting-edge generative AI technologies such as LLMs and collaborate with other highly talented AI and software engineers.
• Help build and improve AI-enabled products such as automated document processing, auto condition clearing, income calculation, call scoring, and virtual assistants.
• Design and own our AI eval infrastructure—golden datasets, automated regression suites, LLM-as-judge pipelines, and online quality metrics for our LLM-powered products.
• Lead model, harness, and training decisions across the AI stack—foundation model selection across vendors, agent frameworks and orchestration, custom fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, LoRA), and RAG/retrieval design.
• Design safety guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and PII handling appropriate to regulated mortgage workflows—because we believe in winning the right way.
• Design and execute end-to-end AI systems with attention to reliability, latency, cost, and observability in production.
• Take ideas from discovery to production solutions—thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast.
• Partner with business stakeholders and work effectively across business, creative, and engineering groups to solve problems and build a positive culture across teams.
• Provide guidance to the broader applied AI community within Red Ventures on the design and execution of AI projects, especially where you bring specific expertise.
• Further the Sage Engineering team’s technical capabilities by bringing novel methods from the field into Red Ventures through hands-on prototyping, software development, and teaching others—leaving the woodpile higher than you found it.
• Drive the development of junior team members through mentorship and coaching.

Benefits

• Health Insurance Coverage (medical, dental, and vision)
• Life Insurance
• Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Holiday Pay
• 401(k) with match
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Parental Bonding Benefit Program
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO): We believe time to rest and recharge is essential. That’s why we offer a generous and flexible PTO policy. Full-time employees accrue 20 days of PTO for a full calendar year annually, with an increase to 25 days after five years of service.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: High school or GED