Associate AI Engineer (Onsite in Los Angeles)

Description

The company sells agile market research solutions that give clients decision-ready insights quickly. Its AI-powered insights platform connects brands with their audiences.

It is a high-growth company where curiosity and ownership are valued, and the work has real impact for well-known brands. The team is based in Los Angeles, a New York City hub, across the U.S. remotely, and in India.

This is an early-career role. Engineers new to the field are welcome, as are engineers with one or two years of experience who want to go deeper into AI and agentic systems. You do not need to know the stack on day one.

You will work alongside senior engineers and help run real AI agents in production.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and refine AI agents, deciding how tool-calling loops, model settings and multi-step workflows are structured with Strands Agents and AWS Bedrock.
• Build and connect MCP tools and servers, and learn how a tool's name and description change what an LLM does.
• Deploy and run agents on Bedrock AgentCore with the platform team and your mentor.
• Build RAG pipelines on pgvector or FAISS, choosing chunking, embedding and retrieval methods based on measured results.
• Write, test and refine prompts. Measure answer quality, latency and token cost, decide which trade-offs to accept, and learn how guardrails are applied on production paths.
• Compare models, tools and approaches, recommend one, and document your reasoning.
• Ship features and bug fixes for FastAPI services with REST and WebSocket APIs backed by PostgreSQL and Redis, owning the design, implementation and tests.
• Work on background jobs and queue consumers so agent tasks run outside the API request path.
• Follow the architecture standards, make design calls within them, keep design documents current, and flag where the standards should change.
• Open pull requests, act on review feedback, and review teammates' code as your experience grows.

Requirements

• Working Python from coursework, internships or work: functions, classes, type hints, error handling and basic testing.
• Data structures and algorithms, with an understanding of time and space complexity.
• SQL basics: joins, aggregations, indexes and schema design. Preferred: PostgreSQL experience.
• Understanding of REST and HTTP and how a web API is organised.
• Git and the pull request workflow.
• Clear communication, willingness to ask questions, and a habit of picking up new tools and asking for help when stuck.
• Preferred: An agent project built with Strands Agents, LangChain, the OpenAI SDK or a similar framework, including how an LLM chooses and calls tools. Coursework, personal or professional work all count.
• Preferred: Model Context Protocol, meaning building or using MCP tools and servers.
• Preferred: AWS Bedrock or Bedrock AgentCore, or AWS basics such as S3 and SQS.
• Preferred: RAG experience with chunking, embeddings and vector stores.
• Preferred: Prompt engineering, including writing, testing and iterating on prompts.
• Preferred: FastAPI or a similar framework such as Flask or Django, SQLAlchemy or another ORM, and a willingness to learn async Python.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience through a bootcamp, self-study or on-the-job work.
• Roughly 0-2 years of software engineering experience. Internships, research and substantial projects count.
• A record of learning quickly, shown through coursework, projects, work, open-source contributions or community involvement.

Conditions

This role is fully in-office in Los Angeles, because the mentoring model relies on pair programming, in-person code review and a mentor nearby.

The expected starting base salary is $90,000-$110,000. The final figure depends on location, experience, skills, knowledge, education and certifications.

The role is also eligible for a variable bonus and may include an equity grant or purchase option. Details are covered in the first recruiter conversation.

The company is an equal opportunity employer that opposes discrimination on any protected basis and complies with the ADA, providing reasonable accommodations on request.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision insurance.
• 401(k) with a company match.
• Equity purchase option.
• Flexible work schedule.
• 15 vacation days and 7 sick days per year, 12 company holidays, and 4 floating holidays or recharge days.
• Paid parental leave.
• Monthly internet and phone stipend to support a remote work setup.
• Wellness perks including Rightway for healthcare navigation, Headspace for mental wellness, Peloton for fitness, and more.
• Weekly community lunches, plus refreshments and snacks at the Los Angeles and New York offices.