Applied AI Engineer

• You'll be the third Applied AI engineer on the Artisan team! We're pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI employees, and you'll play a key role in our product direction.
• Evaluating LLMs, choosing the right models for the right tasks, balancing cost, latency, reliability, and accuracy
• Architecting prompt frameworks and agent behaviors for Ava’s core workflows: email generation, chat interaction, meeting scheduling, prospect research, and more
• Optimizing multi-step agent chains using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web search integrations, and tool use (e.g. CRMs, calendars, APIs)
• Driving infrastructure choices for routing, orchestration, eval loops, and persistent memory across agents
• Building safety, trust, and controls into agents, partnering with product to design user guardrails, fail-safes, and success metrics
• Exploring and deploying emerging modalities from voice AI and talking head technology to multi-modal reasoning - and figuring out how they make Ava more human-like
• Designing agent workflows that make strategic decisions, self-optimize and adapt in real time, and deliver measurable outcomes autonomously

*Location: San Francisco, New York, or Remote USA

Team: AI

Reports to: CPTO, Sam Stallings

Who you are**

• 2+ years shipping real AI products in production - either at an app-layer AI startup or on a foundation model team
• Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (LangChain, ReAct, Dust, OpenAI Tools, etc)
• Strong background in prompt design, chaining, and retrieval systems (experience with OpenAI’s RAG + web search tools or equivalents is a major plus)
• Experience owning latency, reliability, and cost of LLM-powered systems in production
• Ability to think like a researcher but ship like an engineer, exploring novel techniques and getting them into users’ hands quickly
• Excellent communication skills

• Founder mindset. Everyone acts like an owner: take initiative, think big, challenge ideas, and push for 10× outcomes.
• Obsessed with impact. We apply the 80/20 rule, kill sunk costs quickly, and focus on what actually moves the needle.
• Customer-first, always. Every decision starts with the customer experience.
• High standards, every detail. Quality matters in everything we ship, from product and code to copy and design.
• Clear, direct communication. We value candor, fast responses, and real feedback.
• Winning team energy. Positive vibes, low ego, zero drama. We genuinely enjoy building together.