Lead AI Engineer

Hybrid – 3 days onsite About the Role An early-stage, AI-native product company is hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own the model layer of its core product. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on fine-tuning, model optimization, and custom small model development — not prompt engineering or research-only experimentation. This engineer will be responsible for designing, shipping, and iterating on production-grade LLM systems with real-time user impact. Own fine-tuning strategy (LoRA, adapters, distillation, full fine-tuning) Decide when to fine-tune vs. use system-level or prompt-based approaches Improve models based on production feedback Balance quality, latency, and cost Model Performance & Optimization Optimize inference speed and throughput Improve reliability and consistency Define evaluation frameworks and benchmarking standards Custom Small Model Development Design and deploy custom small language models (SLMs) Determine when smaller models outperform larger ones Maintain real-time performance for interactive UX workflows What You’ll Build Fine-tuned models powering generation workflows Custom SLMs for narrow, high-precision tasks Real-time AI features embedded directly into product workflows Multi-step AI systems supporting contextual user interactions Requirements 5+ years software engineering experience 2+ years working hands-on with LLMs in production Proven experience fine-tuning and deploying models to real users Strong applied production track record (not research-only) Python, TypeScript / Node.js Experience deploying custom models to production Deep understanding of inference and performance tradeoffs Ideal Background / Nice to Have's WebSockets Redis ONNX Runtime LLM evaluation & observability tooling Orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain) Early-stage AI product companies (Seed – Series B/C) AI developer tools, automation, or code-generation platforms Fast-paced startup environments *Please note - this role can not provide sponsorship of any kind. All candidates must be Green Card Holders or US Citizens.* #J-18808-Ljbffr Harnham