Founding AI Engineer - Conversational Systems (Equity)

Harrison Clarke; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Harrison Clarke is partnering with a well-funded stealth AI startup in San Francisco to hire a Founding Applied AI Engineer. This is a rare chance to join as one of the first technical hires and help define an AI platform from the ground up, working directly with the founders to design, build and ship production AI systems that will become the product's foundation.

The role is deeply hands-on, owning problems end-to-end—from research and prototyping through to production deployment.

Qualifications

• Experience building production AI/ML systems.
• Hands-on with LLMs, retrieval, or knowledge systems.
• Strong software engineering with shipping production systems.
• Able to work end-to-end from research to deployment.
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration.

Responsibilities

• Build production-grade AI agents capable of reasoning across enterprise workflows.
• Design retrieval, search, and knowledge systems powering intelligent user experiences.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to improve model quality and reliability.
• Build orchestration systems for multi-agent workflows and tool use.
• Improve LLM performance via prompt engineering and post-training techniques.
• Collaborate with customers and design partners to iterate on product capabilities.
• Contribute to establishing the technical foundations of the AI platform as the team scales.

Skills

Production AI/ML

LLMs

Agentic AI

Search systems

RAG systems

Model evaluation

Software engineering

Ownership mindset

Ambiguity tolerance

Founders collaboration

Job description

Harrison Clarke is partnering with a well-funded stealth AI startup in San Francisco to hire a Founding Applied AI Engineer. This is a rare chance to join as one of the first technical hires and help define an AI platform from the ground up, working directly with the founders to design, build and ship production AI systems that will become the product's foundation.

The role is deeply hands-on, owning problems end-to-end—from research and prototyping through to production deployment.