Founding AI Engineer - Phaselab

Rocket Lab; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Rocket Lab is seeking a Founding AI Engineer to join its innovative team in San Francisco. This role involves building and scaling AI products that will shape the future of the company. The ideal candidate should have strong backend development experience and be passionate about creating impactful technology. Join us and be a part of a supportive and collaborative culture focused on quality and growth.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in backend development, ideally in startups.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Golang.
• Experience with NLP libraries and large language models.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with CTO and Product team to develop core AI features.
• Ship major features and update AI classification systems.
• Collaborate on product design and feature improvements.

Skills

Python

Java

Golang

NLP techniques

Large language models

Tools

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

AWS

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Founding AI Engineer – Phaselab

Location: San Francisco

Type: Full-time

Salary: Competitive, with equity options

About Phaselab

Phaselab is rebuilding the legacy eDiscovery industry from the ground up, empowering in-house legal teams with tools for document production that bypass the existing services-heavy approach. We're Seed stage but are already working with Fortune 500 companies and are scaling rapidly.

The Role

We’re looking for an AI Engineer to help us build and scale our core product. You’ll work closely with the CTO, Product Engineer, and Head of Product to ship impactful features and improve performance across the stack. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you’ll directly shape the future of Phaselab’s technology.

What You’ll Do

First Week

• Get onboarded, set up your dev environment, and dive into our systems.

• Ship a small update or bug fix to get familiar with the codebase.

• Use the product to understand how it works and identify areas for improvement.

First Month

• Participate in code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical documentation.

• Ship two major features.

By 90 Days

• Co-own the AI roadmap alongside the CTO.

• Bring major improvements to AI classification system performance through testing and fine-tuning different models.

• Ship product updates daily/weekly with a strong focus on quality.

• Ensure dependencies are consistently up to date.

• Collaborate closely with the Head of Product, CTO, and Product Engineer to shape the future of the product.

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of experience in backend development, ideally with startups or fast-moving teams.

• Strong expertise in a similar server-side programming language like Python, Java, Golang, etc.

• Proficiency with frameworks like FastAPI, Temporal, SQLAlchemy for backend/API development.

• Knowledge of NLP techniques and libraries (NLTK, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).

• Experience with large language models (LLMs) and their application to document analysis.

• Experience with database systems (SQL, NoSQL, vector store like Pinecone).

• Familiarity deploying to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, etc.)

• Familiarity with container orchestration systems (Docker, Kubernetes, Argo) and IaC frameworks like Terraform.

• A bias for action: You ship fast and iterate based on feedback.

• Strong product sense: You think beyond the code and care about delivering an exceptional user experience.

Why Join Us?

• Impact: Your work will directly shape the product and the future of the company.

• Growth: High ownership, deep collaboration with company and technical leadership.

• Speed: We move fast, ship often, and value autonomy.

• Culture: Our team is kind, collaborative, inquisitive, and inclusive – and we want to keep it that way. We have high standards for quality and ethics, and help each other learn in order to reach our objectives. We think technology is best built by teams with a diversity of background, thought, and experience.

Every team member is a human first, and we strive to create a culture and environment that supports your career goals and respects all of the hats you wear in life, not just the ones that earn you a paycheck.

Our Team

We were founded in 2023 by SaaS and data experts: Josh (CEO) lead Chartbeat as CTO to $70M+ ARR and exit; David (COO and Head of Product) lead Cortico (MIT spinoff) from 0->1 as COO; Paul (CTO) ran search infrastructure at Reddit and was engineer #7 at Moat (acquired by Oracle for $850M).

Let’s build something great together!