Applied AI Engineer: Build Production-Grade AI Systems

Surge Group; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Direct exposure to founders

Frontier of applied AI

Own AI systems end-to-end

Job summary

Surge Group is seeking Applied AI Engineers to join early-stage teams building AI products in production. You will operate at the intersection of software, product and ML, translating models into reliable, customer-facing workflows and systems.

You may work on production-grade LLM applications, RAG and knowledge systems, and end-to-end AI features from prototype to production, collaborating with founders and compact technical teams.

Qualifications

• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience building with modern LLMs.
• Experience shipping AI or ML products into production.
• Familiarity with RAG, agents, evaluations or model orchestration.
• Strong product judgment and experimentation skills.
• Ability to move quickly in ambiguous, early-stage environments.
• Genuine interest in building practical AI systems rather than purely academic research.

Responsibilities

• Building production-grade LLM applications and agentic workflows.
• Designing RAG, retrieval and knowledge systems.
• Building evaluations, guardrails and observability for AI products.
• Working with structured and unstructured data at scale.
• Experimenting with models, prompting, fine-tuning and inference strategies.
• Integrating AI systems into real customer workflows.
• Taking AI features from prototype through production.

Skills

Python

Software engineering fundamentals

LLMs

Production AI

Experimentation

Job description

Surge Group is seeking Applied AI Engineers to join early-stage teams building AI products in production. You will operate at the intersection of software, product and ML, translating models into reliable, customer-facing workflows and systems.

You may work on production-grade LLM applications, RAG and knowledge systems, and end-to-end AI features from prototype to production, collaborating with founders and compact technical teams.