Applied AI Engineer — Pointer

Applied AI Engineer — Pointer

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite, 5 days/week) Compensation: $180,000 – $250,000 base + competitive equity Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1 supported Experience Level: 0–4 years Employment Type: Full-Time

About Pointer

Pointer builds AI systems that operate computers like humans — navigating browsers, processing documents, and interacting with legacy enterprise software. Their focus is enterprise finance automation, specifically replacing labor-heavy BPO workflows that historically resisted software automation.

Pointer recently raised a $6M seed round from Amplify Partners (early investors in Datadog and Modal). Current team size is six in San Francisco. Existing enterprise customers include a $2B property management company automating AP and invoice workflows and a major Belgian retailer automating reconciliation across legacy systems.

About the Role

This is a deeply hands-on applied AI engineering role focused on the intelligence layer behind Pointer's automation platform. This is explicitly a research-to-production role — not a pure research role.

Core ownership includes:

• Browser agent reliability

• Document understanding systems

• Inference optimization

• Adaptive self-healing AI systems

• Fine-tuning pipelines for customer-specific workflows

• Production AI experimentation

• Latency optimization via routing, quantization, caching, and model selection

• State-of-the-art automation performance across UI interaction, tool use, and unstructured parsing

Requirements

• Strong Python expertise

• Strong PyTorch fluency

• Applied ML engineering experience shipping production systems

• Metrics-driven evaluation mindset

• Comfortable working with messy real-world data

• Ability to clearly explain systems you personally built

• End-to-end production ownership

• Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week

Nice to Have

• Reinforcement learning experience

• Retrieval systems / RAG

• Agentic systems and browser agents

• Inference optimization and fine-tuning pipelines

• Model monitoring and production LLM systems

• Applied AI workflow engineering

• Research lab exposure (SAIL, BAIR, MIT CSAIL, etc.)

• Published ML research or meaningful open-source contributions

Target Backgrounds

Strong signals include candidates from Ramp, Databricks, Scale AI, Stripe, selective technical startups (Series A–D), and strong research + shipping hybrid backgrounds.

This Role Is NOT For

• Buzzword-heavy resumes with no substance

• Candidates unable to clearly explain what they built

• Scripted communication styles

• Research-only candidates with no production delivery

Benefits

• Coffee, lunch, dinner, and snacks covered

• M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro + monitors

• Unlimited PTO

• 401(k)

Interview Process

• Initial behavioral conversation

• Technical deep dive focused on real systems built

• Take-home assessment

• Paid onsite work trial (1–2 days, travel covered)

• Offer

Logistics

• Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — 5 days/week — please only apply if you can commit to this

• H-1B and O-1 visa sponsorship available

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Pointer.