Senior AI Engineer (Xora Portfolio Company)

Xora Innovation • San Diego, CA

9d • Onsite

About The Position

ELEMYNT is an early-stage startup built by Xora Innovation. We develop applied intelligence that brings AI into the real world. Our platform combines advanced machine learning, high-performance simulation, and modern software engineering to accelerate the design, validation, and deployment of new materials. Our work sits at the intersection of AI, physics, and large-scale computation. The problems are hard, the stakes are high, and the impact is tangible.

This role owns the LLM systems behind our platform: the agents and fine-tuned models that ship as product, and the engineering that keeps them reliable — evaluation, tracing, and production-quality services. It's deeply hands-on, from model internals to shipped software.

The platform runs inside our customers' own secure environments: their compute, their cloud, or a hybrid. So the LLM layer has to work with commercial APIs and self-hosted models alike, and carry its own safeguards wherever it lands. Every LLM capability we ship stands on this work.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related engineering field, and 5+ years building and shipping production software, including deep hands-on work building LLM-powered systems in production.
• Strong Python and a track record of shipping reliable services: async, HTTP and streaming APIs, testing, code review.
• Production experience with LLMs: prompting and context engineering, tool calling, structured output, and the latency and cost work that keeps them usable.
• Hands-on experience designing and shipping agents: the loop, the tools, context, memory, and where they fail. A framework such as LangGraph or equivalent; structured outputs in Pydantic or JSON Schema.
• Experience building RAG systems: embeddings, chunking, hybrid search, reranking, and a feel for what actually moves retrieval quality.
• Direct experience fine-tuning open-weight models (LoRA, QLoRA, or full-parameter) on multi-GPU, including curating and formatting the training data.
• Experience with LLM evaluation and guardrails: LLM-as-judge or automated scoring, regression tracking, and tracing over agent runs.
• Experience building shared LLM tooling or platform components that other engineers build on, and comfort owning ambiguous systems end to end in an early-stage environment.

Nice To Haves

• Self-hosted inference with vLLM, TGI, or SGLang, served behind an OpenAI-compatible interface.
• Interoperability standards for tools and agents, such as MCP.
• Retrieval over structured data: knowledge graphs, hybrid search, reranking at scale.
• LLMs applied to scientific or other technical data; experience making APIs and tool surfaces easy for agents to call reliably.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML: agent frameworks, eval tooling, RAG, fine-tuned models.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship LLM-powered capabilities end to end: prototype, evaluate, deploy, and iterate them into production services users rely on.
• Design agents that plan and carry out multi-step work: tool calling, structured outputs, durable state, and the judgment to know when an agent is the wrong tool.
• Build retrieval that gives models the right context: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, reranking.
• Fine-tune open-weight models with LoRA, QLoRA, or full-parameter tuning on multi-GPU, curating the training data and choosing the method by task, compute budget, and target.
• Build evaluation loops that gate what ships: automated scoring, LLM-as-judge, and regression tracking against curated test sets.
• Instrument model calls and tool use with tracing, so quality, cost, and failures stay debuggable in production.
• Turn LLM capabilities into clean APIs and reusable tooling that other engineers build on.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior