Senior AI Engineer — Applied AI / ML (Potential Contract to Hire)

Braintrust; United States; Remote; USD 34,000 - 48,000; Full time

Job summary

SureHost is an early-stage hospitality technology company building AI for short-term rental operators. Our technical and AI team is based in Pune with customer and product teams in Des Moines, Iowa.

We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer who wants meaningful technical ownership without moving away from the work and who can work across LLMs, computer vision, and workflow automation to deliver production-ready AI systems.

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years of software engineering experience building AI/ML systems.
• Strong Python and software fundamentals.
• Experience deploying AI into production and reasoning about whole-system design.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production AI/ML systems using Python.
• Work across LLMs, computer vision, multimodal models, and agentic workflows.
• Evaluate model APIs vs open-source approaches; design evaluation systems.
• Build data pipelines, APIs, and backend services for production AI.
• Own systems from experimentation through deployment, monitoring and iteration.
• Collaborate with leadership on architecture and technical tradeoffs.
• Own requirements discussions and maintain reliability, testing, and observability.

Skills

Python

AI/ML

Production systems

LLMs

Computer vision

System design

Code review

Job description

• Rate: $25 – $35/hr
• Hours: 40 hours / week
• Experience: 5 - 10 years
• Location: Bangladesh | Brazil | Colombia + 6 more

Location India, Pune preferred

Stay close to the code. Get closer to the decisions.

SureHost is an early-stage hospitality technology company building new ways for short-term rental operators to run and grow their businesses.

Our technical and AI team is based in Pune. Our customer and product team is based in Des Moines, Iowa. We are building the company across both.

Pune is not a downstream engineering center at SureHost. Our India-based technical leaders are company owners and help shape our architecture, technical direction, and strategy.

We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer who wants meaningful technical ownership without moving away from the work.

This is an individual-builder role.

You will work directly with our CTO and AI/architecture leadership to design systems, write production code, evaluate models, work through difficult failure modes, and make technical decisions while the product and architecture are still taking shape.

The hard part starts after the prototype works.

SureHost is applying AI to real customer problems across video and image analysis, multimodal models, LLMs, agents, data, and workflow automation.

A successful demo is only the beginning.

The work includes deciding whether the system is accurate enough, fast enough, reliable enough, and economical enough to hold up when customers depend on it.

You will:

• Design and build production AI/ML systems using Python
• Work across LLMs, computer vision, multimodal models, and agentic workflows
• Evaluate when to use proprietary model APIs, open-source models, adaptation, or a different technical approach
• Design evaluation systems around accuracy, reliability, latency, cost, and known failure modes
• Build data pipelines, APIs, backend services, and the surrounding systems required to put AI into production
• Own systems from experimentation through deployment, monitoring, debugging, and iteration
• Work directly with technical leadership on architecture and technical tradeoffs
• Get close enough to customer and product problems to challenge requirements when a better technical answer exists
• Improve testing, observability, documentation, and production reliability
• Review code and help less-experienced engineers work through difficult technical problems

Your primary job is still to build.

What we’re looking for

This role is likely a fit for someone with 5–8+ years of software engineering experience and meaningful recent work building AI/ML systems.

You should bring strong Python and software engineering fundamentals, experience deploying AI into production, and enough depth to reason about the entire system around the model.

That may include experience with LLMs, multimodal models, computer vision, agents, model APIs, open-source models, evaluation systems, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, APIs, and backend services.

More important than checking every box is evidence of technical judgment.

We are looking for someone who can work through questions such as:

Is the model actually good enough for the customer problem?

Where will it fail?

Should we change the prompt, the data, the model, the architecture, or the requirement?

What belongs in AI and what should remain deterministic software?

What happens to reliability, latency, and cost when this reaches production?

Early-stage experience, video or computer-vision work, workflow automation, or hospitality technology is useful but not required.

Why this role is different

At many companies, becoming more senior means getting farther from the actual system.

That is not the path here.

SureHost needs experienced builders who want to remain close to the code while participating more deeply in architecture, product questions, customer discovery, and technical decision-making.

There are very few layers between a customer problem and the people deciding what gets built.

The architecture is still forming.

The product is still teaching us things.

A senior engineer at this stage has room to influence both.

What you’re joining

SureHost is working with its first paid customer pilot and preparing for broader U.S. expansion.

The technical organization is led across Pune and the U.S. by experienced leaders with complementary strengths in AI, architecture, product, and broad technology leadership.

You will build under that leadership—not underneath a distant chain of decisions.

You will have people to learn from, difficult problems to own, and enough proximity to the business to understand why the system exists in the first place.

The role begins as a full-time contractor engagement, with the potential to transition into a full-time employee role as SureHost grows.

Build with us

If the next step means managing a larger team and getting farther from the code, this may not be it.

If it means owning harder technical problems, working closer to the customer and architecture, and still building every day, we should talk.

Company: SureHost