Principal Applied AI Engineer

ByLabs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

ByLabs in San Francisco seeks an Applied AI Engineer to anchor the US AI Team. You will lead two streams: AI coding tooling and AI application prototypes, turning Silicon Valley engineering depth into ByLabs leverage.

The role emphasizes craft and taste, not platform delivery. You will set Skill Marketplace standards, deliver reference code, and drive dogfooding loops across APAC and US teams, while collaborating with PMs and designers.

Qualifications

• BS in CS or EE; MS preferred.
• 6+ years software engineering with 2+ years in LLM apps.
• Shipped AI applications from 0->1 in production.
• Experience with AI tooling and workflows (LangChain-like stacks).
• Strong backend (Go / Python / TypeScript) and frontend (React / Next.js).

Responsibilities

• Introduce AI Coding tooling best practices and onboarding playbooks.
• Define Skill design conventions and deliver 5–10 reference Skills.
• Prototype an AI-native engineering workflow from spec to release.
• Build internal AI prototypes in employee-facing contexts.
• Provide runnable reference architecture code for APAC teams.
• Lead cross-team craft propagation via talks, blogs, and workshops.
• Participate in AI architecture review processes.

Skills

LLM applications

Full-stack engineering

Prototype-to-dogfooding

Async collaboration

Public technical influence

Architecture review participation

Education

Top-tier CS/EE BS or above; MS preferred

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Devin

Replit Agent

LangGraph

AutoGen

CrewAI

OpenAI Swarm

MCP integration

Job description

We are hiring a Applied AI Engineer for a leading fintech company's AI Team to serve as the team's technical anchor in the United States.

You will lead two primary streams:

• AI Coding tooling and developer experience - bringing the engineering depth of Silicon Valley front-line teams (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Replit Agent, etc.) into ByLabs.
• AI application paradigm exploration and dogfooding - building small, frontier prototypes in internal scenarios that validate streaming UX, transparent agent steps, long-context memory, and other emerging patterns, and propagating them across the team through reference code, blog posts, and workshops.

This role is about craft and taste

You are not a platform architect, nor a BU project delivery engineer. You are the person who turns front-line Silicon Valley product engineering experience into multiplicative leverage for the entire AI Team.

Responsibilities

• Introduce AI Coding tooling best practices - Bring the engineering depth of Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Replit Agent, and similar tools (Skills, hooks, subagents, long-context engineering, MCP integration) into ByLabs. Produce engineer onboarding playbooks and advanced-usage standards.
• Set the bar for the Skill Marketplace - Define Skill design conventions; personally deliver 5-10 reference-quality Skills as exemplars; raise team-wide Skill engineering quality through PR review.
• Prototype an AI-native engineering workflow - Reimagine the spec -> design -> implementation -> review -> testing -> release -> operations lifecycle around AI tools, producing a reference workflow APAC teams can adopt.
• Build internal AI application prototypes (employee-facing scenarios) - In OpenClaw, A2UI, role-bound AI assistants, and similar internal contexts, build small frontier prototypes that validate streaming UX, transparent agent steps, long-context memory, multi-agent collaboration, and other emerging patterns.
• Provide reference architecture code - When APAC teams face hard architectural choices in new AI scenarios, deliver runnable "this is how Silicon Valley does it" reference implementations - not documents, but working code.
• Cross-team craft propagation - One internal tech talk per month, one in-depth blog per quarter, and one onsite workshop in APAC per half year. Distill Silicon Valley AI application best practices into durable team assets.
• Architecture review participation - As the AI Team's anchor in the U.S., participate in ByLab's AI architecture review process and provide frontier perspective and taste-based feedback at the application layer.

Major Requirements

• Education: Top-tier CS / EE BS or above; MS preferred.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years focused on LLM applications.
• Senior AI application engineering experience: Has shipped AI applications from 0 -> 1 in production (not demos). Must have at least one tour of duty as a core engineer at a top-tier Silicon Valley AI company or a leading AI product team - examples include Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and similar.
• Deep AI Coding tooling fluency: Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, or Replit Agent (at least one) is a daily-driver in your workflow, and you can articulate its engineering implementation. Strong understanding of the engineering tradeoffs in Skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, and long-context engineering.
• Agent application engineering depth: Solid grasp of ReAct, Plan-Execute, Reflection, Multi-Agent, and Orchestrator-Worker tradeoffs. Hands-on experience with LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenAI Swarm, or in-house frameworks.
• Strong full-stack engineering: Strong backend (Go / Python / TypeScript). Mid-level or above frontend (React / Next.js). Comfortable with end-to-end streaming rendering and interaction.
• Strong product sense and craft: Comfortable collaborating with PMs and designers; you have considered opinions and taste on AI application UX patterns (streaming, undo, context surfacing, agent-step progress, etc.).
• Public technical influence: A track record of public output - blog, talks, OSS contributions - sufficient to represent the team's craft externally.
• Self-direction and async collaboration: Capable of independently judging value priorities and driving prototype-to-dogfooding loops; effective at collaborating with APAC counterparts via documents, PRs, and asynchronous communication.

Nice to have

• Open-source contributions to LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, Claude Code MCP, OpenTelemetry GenAI, or similar projects.
• Track record of translating research output (papers, blog posts) into production application patterns.
• Experience productizing multilingual (English / Chinese) applications.
• AI experience in the financial or crypto domain.