Applied AI Engineer

Gradial is the marketing operations system of work that helps marketers and creatives move from idea to execution faster. Our platform orchestrates across martech stacks, workflows, and people to automate marketing execution, cutting execution time, so marketers focus on the work only humans can do: shaping brands, understanding customers, and creating the work that moves people.

Backed by leading investors, we’re building software that adapts to the user, not the other way around. We move with urgency, operate with ownership, and solve hard problems from first principles. If you want to do ambitious work, take real responsibility, and help define the future of AI-native content operations, you’ll do your best work here.

The Role

We’re looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help build the next generation of agentic systems. This role combines deep software engineering skills with an experimental mindset around how AI can be practically applied to solve real user problems.

You’ll collaborate across product, research, and engineering to design agents that reason, interact with environments and evolve through feedback. Ideal candidates bring curiosity, a love of ambiguous problems, and hands-on experience applying LLMs in production.

What You'll Own

• Build autonomous and semi-autonomous agent workflows that interact with browsers, codebases, and APIs to complete complex content operations.
• Evaluate model behavior in live environments and pioneer approaches for applying reinforcement learning to end-to-end agent systems.
• Design modular frameworks for tools, memory, and evaluators to enable continuous learning and improvement of agents.
• Develop data pipelines to collect, transform, and annotate real-world usage data for SFT and RL training.
• Design and build proprietary agent libraries, prompting strategies and benchmarking frameworks.
• Partner with customers and internal stakeholders to understand edge cases and align AI behaviors with user expectations.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, with at least a year working directly on AI/ML-powered applications. 
• Strong fluency in AI tooling (e.g. OpenAI APIs, Anthropic APIs). 
• Practical understanding of LLMs, prompt engineering and agentic architectures.
• Experience building production systems that integrate external environments - code execution, browser automation or API orchestration.
• High degree of ownership and comfort in experimental, fast-moving environments.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with benchmarks like SWE-bench or evaluation strategies for tool-using agents.
• Exposure to customer-facing roles or user research for AI product development.
• Background in reinforcement learning or data-centric AI approaches.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is $130,000 – $220,000 annually . Final compensation will be determined based on factors such as experience, skills, and qualifications. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for performance-based bonuses and equity awards. Gradial offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental & vision insurance, 401K retirement plan, paid time off, paid sick leave and other employee wellness programs.

What we offer

• Performance-based annual bonus
• Meaningful equity awards
• Medical, dental & vision (fully covered for employees with 75% for dependents)
• Fertility & family-planning support
• 401k plan
• Unlimited PTO
• A beautiful Seattle office with a gym, sauna, and bike parking
• Free lunch three days a week in our HQ
• A front-row seat to building category-defining AI infrastructure

You'll thrive here if you

• Learn quickly, actively seek out new challenges, and regularly reconsider “how it’s always been done.”
• Want to have real impact with zero bureaucracy.
• Have an innate drive for being 1% better than the day before, building towards greatness.
• Embrace AI as a core tool for problem-solving, innovation, and scale.
• Show customer-obsession (internal or external), high ownership/accountability, and bias for action.
• Communicate clearly, directly, with curiosity, and assuming good intentions.
• Thrive in fast-paced, hyper-growth environments where building better > maintaining status quo.

AI Literacy & Interviewing Tools

As an AI-first company, we prioritize AI literacy as a core competency in our hiring decisions. We’re excited by candidates who thoughtfully apply AI tools in their work, but during interviews we’re focused on you. This is your opportunity to show how you think, communicate, and solve problems. Over-reliance on AI-generated responses during the interview process (especially when it obscures your own voice) will result in disqualification. We want to understand your unique perspective and how you approach challenges, both with and without AI.

Gradial is dedicated to creating an environment where diverse perspectives are valued and all team members can grow. We offer competitive compensation, equity, flexible work hours, comprehensive benefits, and a collaborative culture focused on learning and impact.