AI Engineer

daydream; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage including medical, dental, and vision

Commuter benefit reimbursement

Lunch reimbursement on in-office days

Annual stipend for gym and wellness

Annual stipend for learning and development

Company retreats twice a year

Regular team outings and dinners

Job summary

A leading AI firm located in San Francisco is looking for an Applied AI Engineer to develop core intelligence for their SEO agent. The role involves designing and optimizing LLM-driven systems, translating SEO expertise into AI workflows, and working closely with a senior team. The position offers a competitive salary range of $180,000–$220,000, equity, and comprehensive health coverage along with a focus on personal well-being and learning development.

Qualifications

• Strong experience building production AI or machine learning systems.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs beyond basic API usage.
• Comfort in ambiguous problem spaces and making technical tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate LLM-driven systems that prioritize SEO work.
• Collaborate closely with engineers and designers.
• Ship quickly and iterate based on production feedback.

Skills

AI systems development

NLP concepts

Python programming

TypeScript

C# programming

Job description

daydream is building the world’s best SEO agent, paired with the top 1% of human experts. We own organic search end-to-end, so customers don’t have to hire specialized teams, evaluate tools, or manage agencies.

Winning in search now requires producing expert-level content at scale and adapting continuously as ranking systems and user behavior change. Existing tools surface metrics without making decisions, and agencies depend on slow, manual workflows that don’t compound. Even well-resourced teams struggle to turn sustained effort into reliable growth.

daydream replaces fragmented tools and external vendors with a single system that plans and executes SEO continuously. The SEO agent handles analysis, planning, and generation, while experienced Growth Leads convert that work into shipped pages, technical fixes, and updated priorities, and remain accountable for performance over time.

We’ve raised over $20M from First Round Capital, Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, and SOMA Capital, and are backed by growth leaders from Notion, Airtable, Webflow, and Dropbox, including Lenny Rachitsky and Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO.

The Team

You’ll work closely with a small, senior team across engineering, design, and growth:

• Shravan (CTO), formerly an Engineering Lead at Flixed and a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he worked on mass‑scale web scraping for Facebook Jobs and Meta Reality Labs.
• Vishruth (Founding Applied AI Engineer) previously a Data Scientist at Klaviyo specializing in NLP, with a research background from Cornell.
• Daniel (Founding Applied AI Engineer), formerly a Data Engineer on Tesla’s Autopilot team, working on large‑scale data systems and applied machine learning, and previously Lead Data Engineer at Replit.
• Tom (Founding Designer), who previously led product design at Blockless and contributes to UI engineering.

You’ll also work directly with Growth Leads; senior SEO practitioners who operate the system daily and provide tight feedback loops on how the AI performs in real execution.

How you’ll make an impact

As an Applied AI Engineer at daydream, you’ll help build the core intelligence behind the SEO agent that powers our operating model.

You’ll work on systems that translate expert SEO judgment into production‑grade AI workflows that plan work, generate materials, and drive continuous execution. You’ll own problems end‑to‑end—from framing and design through deployment and iteration—and see your work directly drive customer outcomes.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and operate LLM‑driven systems that prioritize and drive SEO work
• Encode human expertise into structured, repeatable AI workflows
• Architect and optimize complex LLM pipelines for accuracy, reliability, and cost
• Build evaluation frameworks that measure quality and real‑world performance
• Collaborate closely with engineers, designers, and Growth Leads to integrate AI into execution
• Ship quickly, then iterate based on feedback from production usage
• Work primarily across LLM‑driven systems, data pipelines, and AI‑enabled services, using Python, TypeScript, and C#, deployed on Google Cloud with modern foundation models

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong experience building production AI or machine learning systems
• Hands‑on experience working with LLMs beyond basic API usage
• Solid understanding of NLP concepts such as embeddings, retrieval, and generation
• Experience owning systems end‑to‑end, including design, implementation, and iteration
• Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and making sound technical tradeoffs

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in NLP or applied machine learning
• Strong mental models of transformer‑based architectures and modern language models
• Familiarity with probabilistic modeling, algorithms, or statistical inference
• Experience translating domain expertise into scalable software systems
• A high bar for correctness, reliability, and operational quality

Position Location:

This role is based in our Hayes Valley office in San Francisco and requires in‑person collaboration five (5) days per week. We offer paid relocation for candidates outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Compensation:

The base salary range for this role is $180,000–$220,000, depending on experience, along with meaningful equity in daydream.

What You’ll Love

• Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision with HSA and FSA options, plus One Medical, Talkspace, and Teladoc
• Commuter benefit includes a monthly reimbursement to support your commute to the office
• Meals on us include lunch reimbursement on in‑office days, with dinner covered when you’re working late
• Personal well‑being includes an annual stipend for gym, fitness classes, therapy, and wellness expenses
• Learning and development includes an annual stipend for books, courses, and classes to support your growth
• Team retreats include two company retreats per year to connect, collaborate, and reset
• Monthly team time includes regular dinners and outings to spend time together