Applied AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineer
Location: San Francisco, New York, or Remote USA

Onsite/Remote| Full-time

We aren't building another chatbot or a simple copilot; we are building the future of the digital workforce. Our mission is to create autonomous AI employees that function as full-fledged teammates. Our first Ava, is an AI Business Development Representative (BDR) currently supporting hundreds of companies. She doesn't just assist with tasks—she researches leads, crafts emails in a customer's unique voice, manages her own deliverability infrastructure, and handles meeting bookings autonomously.

The Role:

As our third Applied AI Engineer , you will join a high-growth, YC-backed team (currently at $8M+ ARR) to build the next generation of AI workers. You will tackle massive engineering challenges as we develop "Ava 2.0," a step-change in autonomous capability. Reporting directly to the CPTO, you will have a direct hand in product direction and the architectural backbone of our agents.

Key Responsibilities:

• Model Strategy: Evaluate and select LLMs, balancing the trade-offs between cost, latency, reliability, and accuracy for specific tasks.
• Agent Architecture: Design prompt frameworks and agent behaviors for complex workflows including email generation, web research, and CRM integration.
• Workflow Optimization: Build and refine multi-step agent chains using RAG, web search, and tool-use (calendars, APIs, etc.).
• Infrastructure & Safety: Drive choices for orchestration, persistent memory, and "eval loops" while building the guardrails that ensure AI safety and trust.
• Future Modalities: Explore and deploy emerging tech, from voice AI to multi-modal reasoning.

Requirements

• Experience: 2+ years of experience shipping production-grade AI products, either at an app-layer startup or on a foundation model team.
• Technical Depth: Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (e.g., LangChain, ReAct, OpenAI Tools).
• Prompt Engineering: Strong background in prompt design, chaining, and retrieval systems.
• Operational Excellence: Proven ability to own the latency, reliability, and cost of LLM-powered systems in a live environment.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with a penchant for directness and candor.
• Location: Based in San Francisco, New York, or Remote (USA).

Benefits

• Founder Mindset: We empower you to take initiative, challenge ideas, and push for 10x outcomes.
• Impact-Driven: We focus on the 80/20 rule—killing sunk costs quickly and focusing on what moves the needle for our customers.
• High Standards: We care about the details, from the elegance of the code to the quality of the product copy.
• No Drama: We maintain a "winning team energy"—low ego, high positive vibes, and a genuine love for building.
• Growth: Work at a fast-scaling startup ($35M+ raised) with a clear path to market leadership in the AI worker space.

Due to the high volume of applications we anticipate, we regret that we are unable to provide individual feedback to all candidates. If you do not hear back from us within 4 weeks of your application, please assume that you have not been successful on this occasion. We genuinely appreciate your interest and wish you the best in your job search.

Commitment to Equality and Accessibility:

At MLabs, we are committed to offer equal opportunities to all candidates. We ensure no discrimination, accessible job adverts, and providing information in accessible formats. Our goal is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for all. If you need any reasonable adjustments during any part of the hiring process or you would like to see the job-advert in an accessible format please let us know at the earliest opportunity by emailing [email protected].

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