Applied AI/ML Engineer

Applied AI/ML Engineer

New York, USA

Salary: $250,000 OTE ($200,000 Base + $50k Uncapped Performance-Base Bonus)

Stock: Founding Stock Options package at our ground-floor valuation with >100x upside potential and room for growth.

About Aurora

Aurora is the premium lifestyle operating system for the world’s leading post-exit founders, athletes and creatives.

Our mobile app empowers ultra-high-performance individuals and their teams to master their relationships, exploration and longevity.

We operate across 5 lifestyle categories; travel, dining, experiences, luxury goods, and longevity.

To date, we have:

• ⁠⁠raised $4m in funding from Tier 1 investors and entrepreneurs, including the founder of Velocity Black, early investors in Supercell & Deliveroo, the founder of Cleo and the President of VistaJet
• ⁠⁠⁠achieved industry-leading engagement with our paying founding member cohort, with an extensive member waiting list wanting to get access
• ⁠⁠⁠built a proactive, seamless product described as ‘magic’ by our members

We are now expanding our team as we grow our membership base globally.

The Applied AI/ML Engineer

Our core team of 15 is searching for an exceptional applied AI engineer to join as one of Aurora’s founding technical hires.

You’ll work directly with our Co-Founders and product leadership to define and build Aurora’s next-generation agentic platform - intelligent systems that anticipate, curate, and execute on the needs of the world’s highest-performing individuals.

This is a chance to work with one of the world’s richest proprietary behavioral datasets and build a revolutionary consumer AI product.

This role reports directly to Aurora’s Co-Founder & CTO, with the opportunity to rapidly grow into a leadership position across Engineering and Product.

Our Principles

We’re a team of tier-1 backed and exited operators united by our five core principles:

1. We seek truth
2. We are high-leverage
3. We are courageous
4. We care deeply
5. We believe impossible is an attitude

Why Aurora:

1. High Leverage: Place a daily-use product in the hands of the world’s most ambitious and high-achieving individuals and organizations, empowering them to maximize their global impact
2. Cutting Edge AI: Gain hands-on experience working with a revolutionary AI system, redefining lifestyle management at the highest level
3. Generationally Defining: Play an essential role in building the Apple of premium lifestyle management - a >$100bn opportunity at the intersection of technology, luxury, and longevity

About the Founders

Aurora was founded in 2024 by:

• Jonah Lowenstein, previously backed by the investors & operators behind Facebook, Spotify and Venmo
• Aurelius Zwick, UK Young Entrepreneur of the Year
• Dmitry Ogurtsov, former Director of Engineering at Workbounce (conversational AI tool acquired by ZoomInfo)

Aurora’s Chairman is Alex Macdonald, founder of premium digital concierge Velocity Black (acquired by Capital One for $300M).

We’ve raised $4M from tier-1 investors in this space, including Boost Capital Partners, Koro Capital, Insiders VC, Profluence VC, EQT Angel Fund, the Founder of Cleo, the Founder of Wander, the Founder of Velocity Black, and the President of VistaJet US.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and ship applied AI systems that personalize recommendations, automate complex workflows, and power Aurora’s conversational experiences.
• Develop LLM-driven agents that integrate with our backend and internal tools to support real-world use cases in travel, dining, luxury, and wellness.
• Prototype, evaluate, and produce features involving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Collaborate closely with Product and Operations to deeply understand member and curator behavior, transforming that insight into intuitive AI experiences that feel “magical.”
• Continuously refine prompt architectures, memory systems, and tool-use strategies for reliability, accuracy, and contextual depth.
• Lead technical experimentation around proactive recommendation systems, recommendation engines, personalization models, and reasoning loops.
• Contribute to backend architecture and data pipelines, ensuring scalable and reliable delivery of AI features.

Who You Are:

• Deeply product-minded: you care deeply about the customer and think from first principles about how to make their experience seamless and delightful.
• Technically skilled: strong Python experience and a proven ability to build reliable, production-grade AI features.
• Curious and self-driven: someone who obsessively experiments on weekends, brings new ideas to the table, and gets energy from building real, user-facing AI systems.
• Hungry and ambitious: you thrive in early-stage, high-ownership environments where speed, creativity, and adaptability matter more than titles or bureaucracy.
• Strong collaborator who communicates clearly and thrives working alongside product managers, designers, and operators.

Technical Requirements:

• 3+ years of applied ML engineering experience (Python preferred).
• Proficient in web services and comfortable building production-grade APIs and services.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM frameworks and tools
• Proven ability to design and deploy LLM pipelines , including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and tool-use orchestration
• Familiarity with vector databases (Elasticsearch, PGVector, Pinecone) and embedding management .
• Experienced with modern ML model management and experimentation platforms (Hugging Face, Model Garden, MLflow, Weights & Biases).
• Strong understanding of data pipelines , preprocessing, and prompt-level evaluation frameworks.
• Comfortable integrating external APIs and data sources into AI workflows.
• Comfortable with Google Cloud Platform (GKE, GCR, GCS, Cloud SQL, Vertex AI).
• Familiar with containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD workflows.

1. Competitive salary + performance-based bonus.
2. Founding stock options package on the ground floor of a $10bn+ opportunity.
3. Lifestyle access perks at exclusive events and Aurora services.
4. Whoop or Oura Ring on us.
5. $1,500 annual education budget.
6. Whatever tech you need to do your best work.
7. Generous parental leave.
8. Comprehensive health benefits, with 90% coverage including dental and vision.