AI Engineer

Location: Hybrid in San Carlos, California, with 3+ days per week onsite; all work must be performed in the United States.

Salary: $135,000–$260,000 annual base salary plus equity.

Company

Build an AI platform that makes flying safer, more efficient, and more capable through mission-critical systems for aviation and defense.

What you will do

• Build user-facing LLM features using retrieval-augmented generation, tool calling, structured outputs, validation, retries, and fallbacks.
• Develop APIs and workers in Python or TypeScript with streaming, backoff, caching, prompt templates, and context packing.
• Develop retrieval and data-preparation capabilities including chunking, embeddings, indexing, vector search, and knowledge-base synchronization.
• Create offline and online evaluations covering task success, hallucinations, retrieval quality, latency, and cost.
• Implement guardrails, PII detection and redaction, access controls, auditing, and human-in-the-loop workflows for sensitive actions.
• Operate and debug production systems using tracing, logs, dashboards, provider integrations, and model-call monitoring.

Requirements

• Experience shipping LLM features to users and improving them with data.
• Strong production engineering skills, including code, tests, documentation, simplicity, and observability.
• Depth in embeddings, chunking, vector search tradeoffs, function calling, evaluation design, and success metrics.
• Ability to monitor p95 latency, meet SLAs, and reduce cost while maintaining quality.
• Clear communication across product, infrastructure, and security partners.
• U.S. Person status is required; visa sponsorship and visa transfers are not available.

Nice to have

• Experience with Bedrock, OpenSearch Serverless, pgvector, Pinecone, or Weaviate.
• Production prompt versioning, guardrails, and provider routing.
• Multimodal work with time series or video.
• Familiarity with GPU inference, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, aviation, safety-critical systems, CI/CD, IaC, or secure secrets handling.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, focused teams own what they build, ship quickly, and learn fast without heavy processes.
• Work on AI systems for aviation, defense, and major airline partners.
• Healthcare coverage includes 100% of employee medical premiums and 25% for dependents.
• Three weeks of paid time off and 13 or more paid company holidays.
• 401(k) plan available without a current employer match.