Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Surge Group; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Direct founder collaboration

Frontier in applied AI

Ownership of production AI systems

Job summary

Surge Group in New York is seeking Applied AI Engineers to join early teams building AI products for production usage. You will work at the intersection of software engineering, product, and machine learning to turn models into reliable customer workflows.

You’ll contribute to production-grade LLM applications, design RAG and knowledge systems, and help scale AI features from prototype to production while delivering tangible customer value.

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

• Build production-grade LLM applications and agentic workflows.
• Design RAG, retrieval and knowledge systems.
• Develop evaluations, guardrails and observability for AI products.
• Work with structured and unstructured data at scale.
• Experiment with models, prompting, fine-tuning and inference strategies.
• Integrate AI systems into real customer workflows.
• Take AI features from prototype through production.

Skills

Python

LLMs

Production AI

Software Engineering

Experimentation

Tools

Model orchestration

Knowledge systems

Job description

We are working with a number of high-growth AI startups hiring engineers focused specifically on building AI products in production.

These are not traditional ML research roles. The focus is on taking the latest models and techniques and turning them into reliable products, workflows and systems used by real customers.

You could be joining an early team building from 0→ 1 or a well-funded AI company scaling quickly after finding strong product-market fit.

The Role:

We are looking to speak with Applied AI Engineers who enjoy working at the intersection of software engineering, product and machine learning.

You could be:

• 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

What We’re Looking For:

• 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

Why Join:

• Work directly with founders and small technical teams
• Build at the frontier of applied AI
• Own AI systems from experimentation through production
• Ship quickly and see direct customer feedback
• Work on genuinely 0→ 1 problems
• Join companies where AI is the core product rather than an add-on