Senior AI Engineer (LLM)

TL;DR

Senior AI Engineer (LLM): Designing and building production-grade AI systems, agentic workflows, and retrieval systems for B2B clients with an accent on RAG optimization and backend scalability. Focus on transforming architectural blueprints into high-performance code and optimizing agentic orchestration for latency and cost.

Location: Hybrid in San Diego, CA

Salary: $120,000 – $140,000 per year

Company

AI strategy and integration firm building production AI systems for B2B companies in private equity, wholesale lending, real estate, and SaaS.

What you will do

• Design and build complex backend AI modules, including custom agentic workflows and multi-step reasoning chains.
• Architect and optimize RAG pipelines over multi-modal data sources using advanced chunking and re-ranking techniques.
• Manage context window constraints and optimize prompt pipelines for latency and cost.
• Deploy AI services using IaC tooling (Terraform/Pulumi) and containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Identify patterns across client engagements to build reusable internal tools and libraries.

Requirements

• 5-7 years of backend engineering experience.
• 1+ years shipping production AI agents in client-facing or fast-paced product environments.
• Deep experience with vector databases, advanced RAG optimization, and agentic orchestration.
• Proficiency in Python and Node.js with strong backend architecture patterns.
• Infrastructure fluency with Docker, Kubernetes, and IaC tools.
• Certified Claude Architect or ability to earn the certification within 60 days.

Culture & Benefits

• Real ownership of end-to-end system design and deployment.
• AI-native culture utilizing frontier tools for both client delivery and internal operations.
• Early access to new models through partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and YC.
• Upside potential in a bootstrapped, profitable, and fast-growing company.
• Low-bureaucracy environment with small pods and clear accountability.