Artisan
Applied AI
1w ago
150000 –225000 USD / yearUSAMiddlellmprompt engineeringretrieval-augmented generationapicrmorchestrationmachine learning
Applied AI engineer working on autonomous AI employees including large language models, prompt frameworks, agent workflows, and infrastructure.
Requirements
- 2+ years shipping real AI products in production - either at an app-layer AI startup or on a foundation model team
- Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (LangChain, ReAct, Dust, OpenAI Tools, etc)
- Strong background in prompt design, chaining, and retrieval systems (experience with OpenAI’s RAG + web search tools or equivalents is a major plus)
- Experience owning latency, reliability, and cost of LLM-powered systems in production
- Ability to think like a researcher but ship like an engineer, exploring novel techniques and getting them into users’ hands quickly
- Excellent communication skills
How to apply
- Introductory chat with our recruiter
- 15-minute interview with Jaspar, our CEO
- Take home assignment
- 30-minute take home assignment review with Sam, our CPTO
- 30-minute culture and values interview with Jaspar, our CEO
Other
- We're building AI employees. Not chatbots. Not copilots. Autonomous digital workers that do real jobs.
- Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR used by hundreds of companies. She researches leads, writes and sends emails in a customer's voice, runs multi-step outbound sequences, manages her own deliverability infrastructure, self-optimizes over time, and handles objections and meeting booking. She's not a tool someone uses. She's a teammate.
- We're a YC W24 company, have raised $35M+ from investors including Y Combinator, and are at $8M+ ARR. Right now we're building Ava 2.0, a step change in what an AI employee can do. The engineering problems are hard and the surface area is enormous.
- You'll be the third Applied AI engineer on the Artisan team! We're pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI employees, and you'll play a key role in our product direction.
- Evaluating LLMs , choosing the right models for the right tasks, balancing cost, latency, reliability, and accuracy
- Architecting prompt frameworks and agent behaviors for Ava’s core workflows: email generation, chat interaction, meeting scheduling, prospect research, and more
- Optimizing multi-step agent chains using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web search integrations, and tool use (e.g. CRMs, calendars, APIs)
- Driving infrastructure choices for routing, orchestration, eval loops, and persistent memory across agents
- Building safety, trust, and controls into agents, partnering with product to design user guardrails, fail-safes, and success metrics
- Exploring and deploying emerging modalities from voice AI and talking head technology to multi-modal reasoning - and figuring out how they make Ava more human-like
- Designing agent workflows that make strategic decisions, self-optimize and adapt in real time, and deliver measurable outcomes autonomously
- Location: San Francisco, New York, or Remote USA
- Team: AI
- Reports to: CPTO, Sam Stallings
- Founder mindset. Everyone acts like an owner: take initiative, think big, challenge ideas, and push for 10× outcomes
- Obsessed with impact. We apply the 80/20 rule, kill sunk costs quickly, and focus on what actually moves the needle
- Customer-first, always. Every decision is made with the customer experience at the center
- High standards, every detail. Quality matters in everything we ship, from product and code to copy and design
- Clear, direct communication. We value candor, fast responses, and feedback
- Winning team energy. We bring positive vibes, low ego, zero drama, and genuinely enjoy building together