Research Engineer, Applied AI Engineering

OuterSignal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

OuterSignal is seeking a backend-focused software engineer to apply ML/AI to customer-facing products. You will work on AI/data pipelines powering the platform, including prompt chaining, eval design, research APIs, model routing, and prod orchestration.

The evolution of this role includes inference serving, fine-tuning, and synthetic dataset generation, with emphasis on robust, observable production systems across distributed components.

Qualifications

• Experience building production ML/data pipelines.
• Backend-focused with systems design.
• Ability to work across languages.
• Strong measurement mindset.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve production AI/data pipelines across LLMs, APIs, databases and Kubernetes.
• Design evals and build notebooks to measure model behavior and data quality.
• Build observability into AI workflows to monitor cost, latency, reliability and quality.
• Experiment with models, retrieval strategies, structured-output techniques, and model routing.
• Integrate with evolving AI APIs and build abstractions around them.
• Help define future inference serving, fine-tuning and dataset generation infrastructure.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

AI/ML fluency

First-principles thinking

Maintainable code

Observability

Job description

About OuterSignal

We are building the customer intelligence layer for commerce. Brands know when an order comes in, but they only see ~5% of the real story. We show them the other 95%: not just who bought, but who that person is — the execs, influencers, journalists, retail buyers, investors, and everyday customers who become a brand’s best evangelists. Our platform enriches every order in real time with professional and personal signals, builds personas, and powers everything from surprise-and-delight outreach to smarter email flows, analytics, and BD leads. We’re a small, high-performing team building the category-defining platform for e-commerce customer intelligence, backed by a world-class investor base.

About This Role:

This is a backend-focused software engineering role specializing in applying ML/AI to user-facing products. You will work on the systems that power OuterSignal’s AI/data pipeline: prompt chaining, eval design, research APIs, model routing, and prod orchestration. The evolution of this role will include inference serving, fine-tuning, and synthetic dataset generation.

What You’ll Do:

• Build and improve production AI/data pipelines that run across LLMs, APIs, databases, and workflow systems like Temporal, Postgres, ClickHouse, and Kubernetes.
• Design evals and build Jupyter notebooks that help us measure model behavior, data quality, extraction accuracy, and end-to-end customer impact.
• Build observability into AI workflows so we can understand cost, latency, reliability, and quality.
• Experiment with new models, retrieval strategies, structured-output techniques, prompt/program architectures, and model-routing approaches.
• Integrate with fast-changing research and AI APIs, understand their behavior deeply, and build robust abstractions around them.
• Help define the foundation for future inference serving, fine-tuning, dataset generation, and model evaluation infrastructure.

Who You Are:

• A strong engineer who can reason through distributed systems, data pipelines, databases, and are comfortable working across varying programming languages.
• You are extremely AI-fluent and actively use modern AI tools to move faster.
• You have strong first-principles thinking and can turn ambiguous problems into hypotheses, experiments, and shipped systems.
• You have good judgment and taste: you simplify aggressively, avoid unnecessary complexity, and care about maintainability.
• You care about measurement. You do not trust vibes when evals, tests, traces, or data can tell you what is actually happening.
• Bonus: You have experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, Ray, MLflow, RAG, fine-tuning & RL, inference serving, and/or model evaluation systems.

Why Join Now:

• Early seat: You’ll help shape the DNA of OuterSignal’s Applied AI Engineering org from the beginning.
• Massive upside: Meaningful equity in a venture-backed company defining a new category in commerce intelligence.
• Real AI systems: You’ll work on production AI that directly affects customers, data quality, and revenue — not demos or toy agents.
• Big surface area: You’ll help connect research ideas to production systems and customer-facing product.
• Right moment: We’re past prototype, real brands already rely on us, and we have strong PMF — but the ceiling is still wide open.