Senior AI Engineer

Summary:

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior AI Engineer to join our team, located in either San Francisco, CA or Chicago, IL, working in a hybrid model (Tuesday to Thursday). This is a 3-month employment opportunity.

Responsibilities:

• Design and develop AI solutions, ensuring systems are reliable and scalable.
• Write and maintain high-quality Python code, focusing on software engineering principles and API development.
• Take architectural ownership, designing systems from scratch and defending design tradeoffs.
• Evaluate AI models and systems through rigorous testing and debugging.
• Build and operate data retrieval layers, ensuring robust data handling and storage.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-backed systems used by real users.
• Strong proficiency in Python and familiarity with FastAPI or Flask.
• Experience with SQL, data warehousing, and distributed SQL query engines.
• Proven ability to build evaluation harnesses from scratch.
• Practical experience with agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with search or vector databases and foundational SQL and NoSQL.
• Strong analytical skills and experience debugging complex AI pipelines.

Required Skills:

• High proficiency in Python with a strong grasp of software engineering principles.
• Experience in API development, asynchronous programming, and testing.
• Model-provider agnostic experience with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or self-hosted systems.
• Deep fluency in SQL and data warehousing.
• Experience with distributed SQL query engines or cloud warehouses.
• Ownership of evaluation harnesses and understanding of AI evaluation metrics.
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience in building and operating retrieval layers with search or vector databases.
• Strong problem-solving skills in debugging AI pipelines.

Preferred Skills:

• Exposure to finance or accounting domains.
• Experience with text-to-SQL or natural-language-to-analytics systems.
• Experience in rebuilding or replacing v1 systems while in production.
• Chat platform app development experience.
• Experience with large-scale data engineering tools like Kafka, Spark, Airflow, or dbt.
• Semantic or metrics layer implementation experience.
• Experience in environments where correctness was auditable or regulated.

Benefits:

Competitive salary, flexible work schedule, and opportunities for professional growth in a cutting-edge AI environment.