Senior Applied AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineer, Product and Delivery | Hybrid Portland, ME or Remote (East Coast / Chicago) | $225,000 to $275,000 plus equity

Most AI job ads ask for an engineer who can tolerate the business. This one is the reverse.

We are hiring someone whose core strength is problem solving and commercial judgement, and who has started building with AI rather than just talking about it. If you are the person on your team who takes a vague question from an operator, works out what actually needs answering, and has recently been prototyping your own tooling with LLMs, read on.

The Company

A newly independent company, spun out of the value creation team of a private equity firm. Its proprietary platform builds a digital twin of an organisation, simulating its people, processes and systems to produce an actionable roadmap for AI-driven value creation. The founding team comes from quantitative finance, top-tier strategy consulting and leading analytics and technology firms. The work is evidence-based, auditable and used by investors and management teams to make real decisions about real businesses.

This is a founding-stage team. You will shape what gets built.

The Role

You sit between the consultants and analysts doing client work and the engineers building the product. Your job is to close the gap between them.

• Sit with consultants and data analysts, watch the work, and find where it is slow, manual or error-prone
• Take an ambiguous business problem and sharpen it into a requirement someone can build against
• Design and build LLM-powered prototypes to test whether an idea is worth pursuing
• Define what a good output looks like and build the checks that prove it
• Partner with software engineers to productionise what works, and drive adoption into the delivery workflow
• Lead design reviews and mentor the analysts and engineers building alongside you
• Track new models, frameworks and agentic tooling, and form a view on what is worth adopting

What We Are Looking For

The non-negotiables:

• Problem solving. You scope ruthlessly. You know the difference between the analysis that is complete and the analysis that is sufficient, and you ship the second one
• Business acumen. You understand how an operational change shows up in the numbers. P&L, EBITDA, labour cost. You can connect a technical output to a client's investment thesis
• Operator exposure. You have worked directly with the people running a business, not adjacent to them. Your work changed what someone did on Monday
• Quality instinct. You check your own work by reflex. You can tell us about a time you caught something before it went out, and what you changed afterwards
• Strong SQL and the ability to build, not just specify

Big plus:

• Applied AI experience, at any depth. Internal tools, automated workflows, agent prototypes, LLM-assisted analysis. What matters is that you have built something real and learned where it falls over
• Python
• Fluency with agentic development tooling such as Claude Code, subagents and custom skills
• LangChain, LangGraph or similar orchestration frameworks
• Experience with LLM-as-judge evaluation patterns
• Consulting, private equity or another deadline-driven client-service background
• Forward-deployed or solutions work where you built something for one customer and then generalised it into product

You do not need a background as a machine learning engineer. Data analysts, analytics leads, business operations people, consultants and value creation professionals who have started building with AI are exactly who we want to hear from.

What Is On Offer

• Cash compensation of $225,000 to $275,000
• Equity in a newly independent business at the point of spin-out
• Hybrid in Portland, ME preferred, with fully remote considered for candidates on the East Coast or in Chicago
• Direct influence over the product and the technical direction, on a team small enough that your judgement carries

How to Apply

Apply through this advert or get in touch for a confidential conversation.