Applied AI Engineer
Applied AI Engineers build intelligent features into products by integrating LLMs, retrieval systems, and AI APIs to solve real business problems. Day-to-day, they prototype and productionize AI-powered workflows—from designing agent architectures and evaluation frameworks to implementing retrieval pipelines and optimizing inference costs at scale. They sit between product and infrastructure teams, combining hands-on engineering with deep customer collaboration to ship features that work reliably in production. Unlike ML Engineers who train models or Forward Deployed Engineers who embed at customer sites, Applied AI Engineers own the full stack of AI integration within their own organization's products, from architecture decisions to code contributions and technical mentorship.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Developing and deploying generative AI features and large language model integrations into production systems
Designing and architecting full-stack AI applications from frontend to backend systems
Building and evaluating AI agents with complex tool use, orchestration, and workflow automation
Building prototypes and proof-of-concepts to validate AI solutions and architectures
Creating evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure model performance and product quality
Designing scalable APIs, microservices, and backend services for AI-powered applications
Implementing prompt engineering and context management strategies for language models
Optimizing AI system performance including latency, cost, and resource utilization
Integrating multiple data sources and building data pipelines for AI systems
Implementing security, compliance, and reliability standards for regulated and critical environments
Building end-to-end data architectures that aggregate and normalize information across systems
Troubleshooting and debugging AI systems in production environments across customer codebases
Building infrastructure and tooling for agent-driven autonomous systems
Developing human-in-the-loop systems with transparency and inspectability for complex workflows
Designing user interfaces and experiences for AI-native productivity tools and agents
Implementing intelligent routing, prioritization, and alert systems for operational workflows
Implementing multimodal AI capabilities and vision-language model integration
Conducting hands-on pair programming and code reviews with technical partners
Translating business requirements into technical AI solutions and product specifications
Leading technical discovery and workshops to understand customer workflows and constraints
Collaborating across product, engineering, and research teams to define technical roadmaps
Creating technical documentation, tutorials, and reusable frameworks for developer adoption
Operating with high autonomy to make architectural and design decisions independently
Identifying technical patterns and contributing product insights across multiple customer engagements
Designing and shipping product-led growth features with seamless onboarding and shareability
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
41 open Applied AI Engineer jobs across 24 companies.
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