Staff Applied AI Engineer

Collaborative Solutions • Jersey City, NJ

19h • $165,848 - $269,259

About The Position

Collectors is seeking a Staff Applied AI Engineer to join its Applied AI function. This embedded, build-first role owns an entire business domain and its AI opportunity portfolio: identifying and prioritizing problems, building and shipping solutions end-to-end, and demonstrating measurable business impact. The role combines hands-on engineering with domain-level roadmap ownership and leadership. It is not a traditional software engineering or architecture-only position; the ideal candidate leads through shipped work, earns the trust of business leaders, delivers initial solutions personally, and turns successful approaches into durable, reusable patterns for the wider team.

The engineer will spend most of their time building, taking the first, riskiest, or most technically demanding use cases from prototype through production and adoption. They will establish reusable assets and standards, design agents for evidence-based autonomy with traces, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop controls, and use frontier AI tools such as Claude and OpenAI. They will partner with function leaders, shape domain roadmaps, and account for cumulative results. The role also includes reviewing designs and code, unblocking and mentoring engineers, contributing to hiring, and building production-grade applications around AI systems across frontend and backend concerns.

The position reports to the Head of Applied AI. Remote or hybrid candidates will be considered; the company values in-person collaboration. The listed salary range is $165,848–$269,259, with actual compensation dependent on factors including location, job level, experience, and skills. The role may also be eligible for bonuses, commissions, or other compensation.

Requirements

• Demonstrated hands-on builder with a strong bias toward shipping.
• Experience owning a domain, program, or product area and choosing its roadmap, with the ability to explain decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes.
• Experience shipping multiple end-to-end agentic or AI-powered solutions to real users in more than one context, and articulating value delivered, tools used, trade-offs, and lessons learned.
• Daily, fluent use of Claude, OpenAI, or similar AI models, with informed and evidence-based opinions on frameworks, evaluations, and orchestration.
• Ability to work within non-technical teams and translate strategic business problems into a scoped, sequenced portfolio of software work.
• Ability to independently architect and build agent systems, make build-versus-reuse decisions, and participate effectively in design reviews with principal-level engineers.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping production applications, preferably full-stack, with sound architectural judgment across frontend and backend systems.
• Ability to define and measure outcomes in terms of metrics and business value, and take accountability for portfolio results.
• Track record of improving other engineers through review, mentorship, patterns, or tooling.
• Strong communication skills with operators, engineers, and executives, including the ability to engage skeptical stakeholders.
• Commitment to continuous learning and active evaluation of new models, tools, and techniques.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI opportunity across a business domain by mapping workflows, sizing opportunities, and prioritizing what to build and why.
• Personally build the first, riskiest, or most technically demanding use cases in the domain, from prototype through production, adoption, and measured impact.
• Identify commonalities across builds and turn successful approaches into reusable assets, connectors, evaluation harnesses, or workflow patterns.
• Instrument outcomes before building and report on the cumulative business value delivered across the domain portfolio.
• Design agents with traces, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop gates to support evidence-based increases in autonomy.
• Use frontier AI models and orchestration tools, and bring informed recommendations on models, harnesses, and tooling to platform decisions.
• Build trust with function leaders, navigate competing priorities, secure sponsorship, and maintain stakeholder engagement through delivery.
• Review designs and code, unblock senior and mid-level engineers, contribute to interviewing, and improve the effectiveness of other builders.
• Design and implement production-grade application layers around agents and AI workflows, applying sound judgment across frontend, APIs, state, latency, reliability, security, and scalability.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for full-time employees.
• Fertility, commuter, and educational assistance benefits for full-time employees.
• 401(k) matching plan.
• Flexible time off for salaried employees.
• Ten company-paid holidays for regular, full-time employees.
• Discounts on select grading services for approved employee submissions.
• Flexible schedules offered by many teams.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed