Artificial Intelligence Engineer

AI Engineer / Applied AI Generalist Location: Austin, TX (On-site, 5 days/week) Employment Type: Contract-to-Hire About the Role We are partnering with a small, high-impact product team that builds and ships AI-powered products directly to end users. The team operates in a fast-moving, hands-on environment where engineers are expected to take full ownership from idea through production. The Chief Data Scientist is heavily involved in all hiring decisions and is currently growing a lean team of engineers. The focus is on hiring versatile, high-agency builders who can work across software engineering and applied AI not narrow specialists. This is a builder-first environment where speed, ownership, and practical execution matter more than titles or academic background. What You’ll Do • Build and ship AI-driven products used by real end users • Develop and deploy agentic AI systems and LLM-based applications • Work across the full stack: from backend systems to AI model integration • Contribute to product development in a highly hands-on engineering team • Collaborate directly with technical leadership in a fast-moving environment • Own features end-to-end in a small, high-accountability team What We’re Looking For • Strong software engineering background (Python preferred) • Proven experience building and shipping production software or AI products • AI generalist mindset (not purely ML research or data science focused) • Experience or strong interest in applied AI and LLM-based systems • Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS preferred) • Exposure to modern AI tooling (e.g., agentic frameworks, LLM APIs) Nice to Have • Experience with agentic AI systems or frameworks (LangChain, multi-agent systems, etc.) • Experience building supervised ML or production AI systems • Startup or fast-paced product engineering background Ideal Profile We are looking for “AI builders” engineers who naturally sit closer to software engineering than data science or ML research. The strongest candidates will have a track record of independently shipping products and working in environments where they are accountable for outcomes, not just models or experiments. Key Details • Strong preference for full-time hires • On-site in Austin, TX (5 days per week) • Small team environment (currently ~4 engineers, growing) • High ownership, high impact role