Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer $250-300k + Equity - San Francisco Bay Area | Hybrid

Early-Stage Startup - Full-Time - AI Engineering

Join a fast-growing early‑stage startup building a next‑generation, AI‑native design‑to‑code platform. The team is creating a new category of design tooling where code renders directly as design, real‑time AI is deeply embedded into the workflow, and designers work directly in the medium that ships to production.

We are now hiring a Lead AI Engineer as the first dedicated AI specialist on the team—owning the model layer, driving fine‑tuning strategy, and building custom SLMs that power a highly interactive, high‑performance product.

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The Role

As the Lead AI Engineer, you’ll take end‑to‑end ownership of model development, optimization, deployment, and evaluation. This is a hands‑on, production‑focused role where you will build and maintain the AI systems at the core of the product experience.

You’ll work at the intersection of models, systems, and product—shipping production‑grade AI features, shaping technical direction, and establishing best practices for evaluation and performance.

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What You’ll Do

Model Fine‑Tuning & Specialization

• Lead fine‑tuning efforts across LoRA, adapters, distillation, and full fine‑tuning
• Decide when fine‑tuning, prompting, or system‑level approaches are most appropriate
• Iterate models based on real product signals and user feedback
• Balance quality, latency, reliability, and cost

Model Optimization & Performance

• Optimize inference speed, throughput, and per‑request cost
• Improve model determinism, consistency, and real‑time responsiveness
• Define and maintain benchmarking, evaluation, and observability frameworks

Custom SLM Development

• Build small, fast language models tailored for design and code‑generation workflows
• Identify use cases where SLMs outperform larger models
• Maintain and evolve SLMs in production environments

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What You’ll Build

• Fine‑tuned models for design‑to‑code generation
• Custom SLMs for narrow, high‑precision workflows
• Real‑time, streaming AI features inside a design environment
• Multi‑step agentic systems supporting “prompt‑as‑cursor” and next‑in‑flow interactions

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How You’ll Work

• ~80% hands‑on coding, 20% systems‑level strategy
• Full lifecycle ownership: scoping → experimentation → deployment → monitoring → iteration
• Close collaboration with engineering and product leadership
• Operate within a highly senior, fast‑moving engineering team
• Ideal for builders coming from AI‑native, high‑velocity environments

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What We’re Looking For

Must‑Have Experience

• 5+ years software engineering
• 2+ years hands‑on work with LLMs in production
• Proven fine‑tuning experience (LoRA, distillation, adapters, full fine‑tuning)
• Strong Python and TypeScript/Node.js skills
• Experience deploying custom models end‑to‑end
• Understanding of inference optimization and performance tradeoffs
• Experience with model evaluation and benchmarking

Nice‑to‑Haves

• ONNX Runtime
• Redis
• WebSockets
• LangChain or similar orchestration tools
• Model optimization and compression techniques
• LLM observability tooling

Ideal Background

• Experience in AI‑native product startups (Seed → Series B/C)
• Work in code generation, developer tools, design tooling, or AI automation
• Strong applied experience shipping models to production at speed

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How to Apply

If this role aligns with your experience and interests, please reach out with your Resume or LinkedIn profile. I would welcome a confidential conversation to explore whether it’s the right fit.