Applied AI Engineer — Early Career

Goaly AI; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Complimentary lunch

Dinner provided and snacks

Visa sponsorship available

Job summary

Goaly AI is seeking an exceptional early‑career engineer to join the technical team in Palo Alto. You will own meaningful AI problems end‑to‑end, from problem framing to production rollout, working directly with the founding team across model post‑training, RL environments, distributed systems, training or inference performance, backend services, APIs, SDKs, or developer tools.

This role is designed for recent graduates or engineers showing exceptional ability through OSS, projects, internships,

Qualifications

• A bachelor’s or master’s in CS, engineering, math, or related field — or equivalent ability demonstrated through your work.
• Typically 0–2 years of full‑time experience.
• Strong coding skills and CS fundamentals, with evidence from projects, research, internships, competitions, or shipped products.
• A track record of learning quickly, taking initiative, and delivering ambitious work with limited structure.
• Genuine curiosity about the AI frontier & Continuous learning — you track new models, research, tools, and applications.
• Grit, humility, and a willingness to work hard on high‑impact problems.

Responsibilities

• Build applied AI projects end-to-end — from problem framing and prototyping to evaluation, production rollout, and iteration.
• Create agentic systems and applications, including agent harnesses, tool use, workflows, memory, and multi‑step execution.
• Apply strong prompt, context, and loop engineering to make models more reliable and efficient on real‑world tasks.
• Track frontier models, research, and AI‑native developer tools; test what is useful and turn capabilities into product improvements.
• Design evaluations, datasets, and feedback loops to measure model and agent performance and guide iteration.
• Move across the stack from model APIs/inference to backend services and developer tooling.
• Use AI coding and development tools, while maintaining strong technical judgment and code quality.

Skills

CS/Engineering degree or equivalent

Strong coding skills

Fast learner

Curiosity about AI frontier

Grit and humility

Clear communication

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering/Math

Tools

OSS contributions

ML/LLMs

Distributed systems

GPUs

Compilers

Databases

Networking

Job description

About Us

We’re building toward a world where every company can become its own AI lab. Goaly is a stealth AI startup founded by ex-Meta Superintelligence Labs engineers and researchers. Our mission is to dramatically lower the cost, time, and talent barriers to building proprietary AI — and make each generation of models faster and cheaper to build than the last.

Backed by leading AI investors and endorsed by frontier AI researchers and builders, we’re looking for exceptional new grads who want to work on hard, foundational AI systems problems with outsized ownership from day one.

About The Role

Join as a full member of the technical team from day one. You’ll own meaningful AI problems end-to-end — not just a narrow component — and work directly with the founding team across model post‑training, RL environments, distributed systems, training or inference performance, backend services, APIs, SDKs, or developer tools. We move fast, give strong engineers real responsibility early, and encourage great work to become papers, open‑source contributions, and production systems used by real customers.

This role is designed for exceptional early‑career engineers finishing or recently finished with a bachelor’s or master’s degree, or showing equivalent ability through what they’ve built. We look for raw technical strength, initiative, and unusual learning speed more than pedigree. That can show up through research, OSS, ambitious projects, internships, competitions, startup work, or products used by real people.

Candidates with deeper research experience, including AI PhDs, may be a stronger fit for our AI Research Scientist — Early Career role.

What you’ll do

• Build applied AI projects end-to-end — from problem framing and prototyping to evaluation, production rollout, and iteration.
• Create agentic systems and applications, including agent harnesses, tool use, workflows, memory, and multi‑step execution.
• Apply strong prompt, context, and loop engineering to make models more reliable, capable, and efficient on real‑world tasks.
• Track frontier models, research, and AI‑native developer tools; quickly test what is useful and turn new capabilities into product improvements.
• Design evaluations, datasets, and feedback loops to measure model and agent performance, diagnose failures, and guide iteration.
• Move fluidly across the stack depending on where the hardest problem is — from model APIs and inference to backend services, developer tooling, and product features.
• Use AI coding and development tools aggressively but thoughtfully, while maintaining strong technical judgment and code quality.

Why Goaly

Work on frontier AI problems across model training, inference, agentic RL infra, and domain‑specialized continual learning.

Build systems that push research into production — from new mode recipes and post‑training methods to infrastructure that runs at serious scale.

Publish and contribute to open source and top AI conferences, with opportunities to pursue work worthy of top AI conferences and release impactful OSS used by the broader AI community.

Serious resources to build with: well‑capitalized, substantial GPU capacity, and competitive compensation.

Learn directly from a founding team that has trained trillion‑parameter models and built frontier‑scale AI infrastructure, while developing your own research and technical leadership.

Own meaningful problems from day one. On a small, highly technical team, you’ll have unusually large scope, research freedom, and direct impact on both the product & technical roadmap.

Move fast and own the full problem, not one tiny component. Work directly with the founding team, make technical decisions quickly, and take ideas from research to production without layers of process.

H-1B sponsorship available; OPT/CPT candidates welcome.

You may be a good fit if you have

• A bachelor’s or master’s in CS, engineering, math, or a related field — or equivalent ability demonstrated through your work. Typically 0–2 years of full‑time experience.
• Strong coding skills and CS fundamentals, with evidence from projects, research, internships, competitions, or shipped products.
• A track record of learning quickly, taking initiative, and delivering ambitious work with limited structure.
• Genuine curiosity about the AI frontier & Continuous learning — you actively track new models, research, tools, and applications and like experimenting with what’s newly possible.
• Grit, humility, and a willingness to work hard on the highest‑impact problem, even outside your initial area of expertise.
• Clear communication and comfort working in a fast‑moving, low‑ego team.

Strong pluses

• Meaningful OSS contributions or independent systems used by others.
• Experience with ML/LLMs, distributed systems, GPUs, compilers, databases, networking, or performance.
• Strong results in research, competitions, technical internships, or startup work.
• A track record of turning ideas into working systems quickly, measuring results, and iterating.

Location, visa sponsorship & benefits

• Hybrid in Palo Alto: 4+ days/week in office.
• Visa sponsorship: H‑1B and OPT/CPT support available, with immigration counsel.
• Meals & perks: Complimentary lunch, dinner, snacks, and drinks.

A note on qualifications. We value exceptional ability over perfect keyword matches. If the work excites you and you can show strong technical ability, learning speed, or ownership, we encourage you to apply.

Equal opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We provide reasonable accommodations for candidates who need them during the hiring process.