Senior Software Engineer - Applied AI

Plot Technologies, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

A high-growth startup is seeking an experienced AI Product Engineer. You will build reasoning-driven systems with LLM technology and collaborate with product design to shape innovative features. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of shipping user-friendly products, strong familiarity with AI/LLMs, and a passion for design and product development. This role offers a unique opportunity to influence both the product and the company and requires a high ownership mindset without formal degree requirements.

Qualifications

• Track record of shipping customer-facing products.
• Hands-on familiarity with LLMs and AI evaluation methods.
• Strong product sense and design instinct.

Responsibilities

• Build reasoning-driven systems using LLMs for consumer intelligence.
• Collaborate with product design to iterate and ship AI features.
• Design and execute LLM/ML evaluation frameworks.
• Own full-stack AI product features and UX.
• Research and integrate emerging methods in AI.

Skills

Product shipping

LLM familiarity

Product sense

High ownership

Curiosity

Job description

Why Plot

Plot is building the next generation of social intelligence — an AI-native platform that helps some of the world's most influential brands understand culture, find emerging trends, and activate their communities at scale. We're a high-growth, venture-backed startup supported by the co-founders of Reddit and Plaid, with customers like Tory Burch, Lululemon, La Roche-Posay, and other household names.

We operate at the frontier of applied AI and agentic systems, ingesting and reasoning over millions of short-form videos to uncover consumer insights no one else can see. Our work impacts real product decisions, global marketing campaigns, and how brands engage their fans.

You'll join a small experienced team where engineers ship product — not tickets. You'll work hand-in-hand with our product designer from day one, shaping features before specs exist and turning rough ideas into shipped experiences. You'll work directly with founders, hop on customer calls, and own company-defining features end-to-end. If you want real responsibility, fast learning loops, and the ability to shape both product and company, Plot is the place. It's also a perfect fit if you aspire to build your own startup one day — we operate with a deep founder's mindset.

What You'll Work On

• Build agentic, reasoning-driven systems on top of cutting-edge LLMs to power consumer intelligence, marketing automation, and influencer activation.

• Collaborate deeply with product design to prototype, iterate, and ship AI features from 0→1. You'll be in Figma reviews, whiteboarding sessions, and user interviews — not just implementing handed-down specs.

• Design & execute LLM/ML evaluation frameworks — from offline benchmarks to live A/B tests — to measure quality, reliability, and business impact.

• Own full-stack AI product features: prompt design, orchestration, tooling, monitoring, and the UX that brings it all together.

• Collaborate closely with founders, design, marketing, and customers to ensure our AI deliver real customer value

• Stay at the front of the curve: research, prototype, and integrate emerging methods in agentic reasoning, context engineering, and LLM-driven automation.

• Note: This role is not focused on training foundation models — it's about building high-leverage systems on top of them (think "Claude-Code over Claude-Model").

What We're Looking For

• Proven track record shipping customer-facing products. You've built features users love and can move quickly across the entire stack — frontend, backend, infrastructure.

• Deep, hands-on familiarity with LLMs — evaluation, prompt engineering, tool use, context management, and agentic workflows. You stay current with the latest advances in AI and are excited to experiment with new techniques and apply them to real product problems.

• Strong product sense and design instinct. You have opinions about what makes AI experiences great — and what makes them terrible. You're comfortable working with designers in the earliest stages, before the UX is settled, to collaboratively shape what the product should be. You can wear multiple hats: engineer, product thinker, and user advocate.

• High ownership mindset. You like talking to users, debugging real data, reading logs, and doing the unglamorous work required to build great AI products.

• Curiosity, grit, and a drive to build things that feel like magic. No degree requirements.