Artificial Intelligence Engineer

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

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