Job Description
Who is Recruiting from Scratch:
Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.
https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/
Title of Role: Applied AI Engineer (LLMs / Agentic Systems)
Location: San Francisco, CA or New York, NY
Company Stage of Funding: Series A (~$50M raised)
Office Type: Onsite (5 days/week)
Salary: $150,000 – $300,000 + Equity
Our client is a fast-growing, venture-backed AI infrastructure startup building the intelligence layer for financial services. Their platform enables firms to unlock insights from complex, unstructured, and proprietary data—powering better decision-making at scale.
Backed by top-tier investors and founded by leaders from companies like Stripe and Notion, the company is operating at the frontier of applied AI, helping financial institutions leverage LLMs and agentic systems to transform their workflows.
What You Will Do
- Build and productionize AI systems leveraging LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows
- Design retrieval systems that extract and synthesize insights from unstructured data sources (documents, emails, etc.)
- Develop evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to measure and improve AI system performance
- Build knowledge graphs capturing complex relationships across financial data
- Implement systems ensuring traceability and explainability of AI outputs
- Experiment with cutting-edge LLM orchestration techniques and context management
- Work directly with customers to iterate on AI systems based on real-world usage
- Own systems end-to-end, including deployment, performance, and reliability
Ideal Candidate Background
- 3–7 years of experience in applied AI, ML engineering, or related fields
- Strong experience with LLMs, RAG systems, and agent-based workflows
- Experience building and deploying production AI systems (not just research)
- Strong proficiency in Python and modern ML/AI tooling
- Experience with retrieval systems, embeddings, or multi-modal data processing
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to operate in fast-paced environments
- Interest in financial markets or willingness to learn domain quickly
Preferred
- Experience at high-growth AI or data infrastructure companies
- Background in full-stack engineering (React/TypeScript + backend systems)
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI systems
- Research background or publications in relevant AI/ML fields
- Experience with knowledge graphs or complex data modeling
- Startup experience or strong entrepreneurial mindset
Compensation and Benefits
- Competitive base salary: $150,000 – $300,000 (flexible based on experience)
- Competitive equity package
- Visa sponsorship available
- Work onsite with a small, high-caliber team
- Opportunity to work on frontier AI problems with real-world impact
- High ownership as an early engineering hire (~first 20 engineers)
- Fast interview process (~1 week turnaround)
This is a rare opportunity to work at the cutting edge of applied AI, building systems that directly impact how financial institutions operate and make decisions.
