About Limelight

Limelight is the world’s first AI-native B2B influencer marketplace and social listening platform. We’ve built an intelligence engine that captures real-time intent signals from social platforms to identify B2B buyers before they even enter a traditional sales funnel.

We have built an agentic coding environment and are now building AI employees for B2B marketing starting with customer advocacy, employee advocacy, and influencer marketing.

Today, Limelight powers 10,000+ verified creators and is trusted by the world’s best GTM teams at HubSpot, Webflow, Clay, Xero, and Bill.com. We aren’t just a tool; we are the system of record for creator-led demand.

🚀 Why This Role?

Be the AI Foundation: You’re not fine-tuning someone else’s models. You’re building the intelligence layer from the ground up—the AI that powers matching, intent scoring, and prediction for an entirely new category.
Ship at Startup Warp Speed: We are a small but mighty team that automates everything and ships insanely fast. No committees. No six-month roadmaps. You’ll push code to production in your first week.
AI-Native Culture: This isn’t a company that “adopted AI.” We were born in it. Every team member uses AI tools daily. Every engineer is expected to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-assisted development.
Founding-Level Impact: As a founding engineer, you’ll shape the architecture, the culture, and the technical DNA of the company. Equity reflects that.

🛠 What You’ll Do

Own the AI Stack: Design, build, and ship the AI systems that power our marketplace—from creator-brand matching algorithms to intent signal processing and predictive analytics.
Build Agentic Workflows: Create AI agents and automated pipelines that make our small team operate like a company 10x our size. Automation isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s how we win.
Experiment Relentlessly: Evaluate and integrate the latest models, frameworks, and tools—LLMs, embedding models, vector databases, agentic frameworks. If it shipped last week, you’ve already tried it.
Ship Full-Stack Features: You won’t just build models in a notebook. You’ll deploy production AI features end-to-end, working closely with our product and design team to make AI feel magical to end users.
Scale the Data Layer: Architect data pipelines that ingest social signals at scale, process creator and brand data, and feed real-time insights into our platform.

🎯 Who You Are

AI-Obsessed, Not Just AI-Familiar: You don’t just use ChatGPT. You’ve built with Claude, Gemini, open-source models, and whatever dropped on Hugging Face this morning. You have opinions on prompt engineering, RAG architectures, and model selection.
A Builder, Not a Researcher: You care about shipping, not publishing. You’d rather deploy a “good enough” solution today and iterate than spend three months chasing a perfect one.
Automation-First Mindset: You instinctively ask “How can I automate this?” before doing anything manually. You’ve built internal tools, scripts, and workflows that made your previous teams wildly more productive.
High-Agency: You thrive in ambiguity. You don’t wait for a spec. You talk to users, identify the highest-leverage problem, and start building.
Taste: You understand that AI features need to feel intuitive, not just work. You care about the user experience of intelligence—not just the model behind it.

✅ Must-Haves

6-12+ years building and deploying production AI/ML systems—not just Kaggle competitions.
Hands-on LLM Experience: You’ve built real products with GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, or similar. You understand prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, and when to use each.
Full-Stack Capability: You can go from a Python notebook to a deployed API to a React integration. You don’t throw models over the wall.
AI Tool Fluency (Non-Negotiable): You actively experiment with every major AI tool—coding assistants, agentic frameworks, image models, voice, whatever’s new. This is a requirement, not a bonus.
Cloud Infrastructure: Strong experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure for model deployment, data pipelines, and production systems.
Startup DNA: You’ve operated in fast-moving, venture-backed environments and know how to ship without perfect information.

💎 Nice-to-Haves

Background in MarTech, SalesTech, Marketplaces, or the Creator Economy.
Experience with vector databases, embedding models, and semantic search systems.
Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar).
Contributions to open-source AI projects.

The Process

We value your time. Our process is designed to be fast and transparent:

Intro Call (30 min): Align on goals and vibe.
Technical Deep Dive (45 min): Walk us through something you’ve built that you’re proud of.
Pair Session (60 min): Build something small with us. Real code, real problem, real collaboration.
Founder Meet: Vision, values, and what “founding” really means here.
Offer. (Fast. We don’t ghost.)

Ready to build the AI engine behind B2B’s next big shift? Let’s talk.

Senior Software Engineer (AI)

Benefits