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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Early-Stage Startup - Full-Time - AI Engineering