Senior Applied AI Engineer

Description

The company is forming a new AI Engineering team to help every group put AI to work.

The team will turn the strongest ideas from a company-wide AI workshop into tools that can be deployed.

The goal is to make steps that are slow, costly, or limited to a few experts faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone, from machine build and bringup to daily engineering.

This is a senior founding role with high autonomy. You will set the standard for the team and help hire and grow its talent quickly.

Your applied AI skills will complement the company's in-house physics, controls, and hardware expertise. A quantum computing background is not required.

Success means tools that teams adopt, components others reuse, well documented and tested work, and projects that reach done or a clean stop with little supervision.

Responsibilities

• Take projects from a rough idea to a deployed, maintained product, owning each one end to end.
• Set the technical direction and reusable patterns the team follows, and show the company what good AI software looks like.
• Design and deploy LLM and agent systems covering retrieval, tool use, orchestration, and evaluation, with guardrails and people in control where it matters.
• Work with engineering, hardware, operations, and other groups so they can build and own tools from their own ideas.
• Build shared components, templates, and infrastructure that speed up other teams.
• Choose right-sized models, optimize cost, latency, and reliability, and track usage and quality.
• Mentor teammates and grow the group's skills, modeling clear specs, real documentation, tests, and honest estimates.
• Drive work to completion on your own, and stop work early and cleanly when that is the right call.

Requirements

• Required: deep software engineering skills and a record of shipping and running production software at scale, mainly in Python, with strong habits in testing, code review, CI/CD, and documentation.
• Required: hands-on experience building LLM applications, including prompt and agent design, tool and function calling, MCP-based integrations, retrieval-augmented generation, and careful evaluation.
• Required: proven experience with agentic systems and agentic coding workflows, including agents that act on real systems safely.
• Required: sound architecture judgment to design systems others build on, and to deliver end to end across backend services, APIs, light front-end work, and deployment.
• Required: strong autonomy and ownership. You work well with ambiguity and take a project from idea to production with little oversight.
• Required: a track record of impact you can point to. Publications and notable open-source or research work count, but shipped software and fast real-world delivery carry more weight.
• Required: you multiply the effect of the people around you, communicating clearly, mentoring well, and turning a non-expert's need into a working tool.
• Preferred: LLMOps and MLOps, including model serving, monitoring, evals, and cost and latency optimization through right-sizing models.
• Preferred: data and ML engineering, including pipelines, embeddings, vector databases, and fine-tuning or adapting models.
• Preferred: deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch, and experience building or adapting generative models like diffusion or image generation, useful if the team does more model building over time.
• Preferred: front-end and UX work for internal tools, such as React and TypeScript.
• Preferred: experience with modern coding agents and the wider agent tooling ecosystem.
• Preferred: Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD tooling.
• Preferred: exposure to scientific, hardware, lab automation, or other complex operational environments.

Conditions

The approximate base salary range is $175,000 - $210,000.

Base pay depends on factors such as geographic placement, role-specific knowledge, skills, and experience, and the company reviews ranges against external market data regularly.

The company is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse workplace and does not discriminate on any protected characteristic, including in hiring and promotion.

Benefits

• Equity grants are provided to all new hires.