Sr. AI Engineer
Role summary
This early-stage startup is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to join its founding technical team. The role requires a strong backend software engineer with experience in applied AI, specifically building agentic applications and LLM systems in production. Responsibilities include designing and productionizing RAG pipelines, owning backend services for AI features, and collaborating with product and infrastructure teams. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a preference for 1+ year building agentic applications or RAG pipelines in production. This is a hands-on role focused on building real products, not pure research or ML infrastructure.
One of our early-stage investments is looking to bring on a Senior AI Engineer to join the founding technical team.
We’re looking for someone who has built agentic applications in production at a company with a strong engineering bar. This isn’t a “tinkering only” role. The ideal candidate is a strong backend software engineer who has moved into applied AI and enjoys building real products with LLMs.
What you’ll do
- Build and ship agentic applications and AI-powered workflows used directly by customers
- Design and productionize RAG pipelines and other modern LLM systems
- Own backend services that support AI features, including async processing, integrations, and data access within customer environments
- Collaborate closely with product and infrastructure engineers to turn ambiguous problems into reliable systems
What we’re looking for
- Typically, 5+ years of cumulative software engineering experience (or exceptionally strong with 3+ years)
- 1+ years building agentic applications in production (preferred)
- Alternatively, 1+ years building production RAG pipelines or other modern applied AI systems
- Strong backend engineering foundation: designing services, data models, and async processing systems
- Experience in environments with a high engineering bar for production AI systems
Not a fit if your background is primarily
- Classic ML research or modeling work
- ML infrastructure / platform roles
- Pre-training focused experience
Nice to have
- Enterprise integrations and working in customer environments
- Workflow orchestration / job processing frameworks
- Building internal tools, developer platforms, or UI-driven software
What makes this compelling
- Early, high-impact role on a small founding team
- Opportunity to shape core AI architecture and product direction
- Strong peers, fast iteration, and real customer problems
- Competitive compensation and meaningful equity
Team Size:
< 10
Work Culture:
5 days/week in SF Office
About Us:
Greylock is an early-stage investor in hundreds of remarkable companies including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Workday, Cloudera, Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Coinbase, Palo Alto Networks, among others. More can be found about us here: https://greylock.com/
How We Work:
We are full-time, salaried employees of Greylock and provide free candidate referrals/introductions to our active investments. We will contact anyone who looks like a potential match--requesting to schedule a call with you immediately.
Due to the selective nature of this service and the volume of applicants we typically receive from our job postings, a follow-up email will not be sent until a match is identified with one of our investments.
Please note:
We are not recruiting for any roles within Greylock at this time. This job posting is for direct employment with a startup in our portfolio.
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