AI Engineer at Fluent - Build LLM Agents in Ad Tech

Pioneering Role with High Visibility: Being Fluent's first dedicated AI Engineer is a double-edged sword — you have enormous impact and ownership, but you are also defining the function from scratch with limited institutional support. This is ideal for someone who thrives with autonomy, but potentially risky for someone who needs established mentors in the AI space.

Compensation vs. Market: The $130k–$155k base (plus bonus) is competitive for a mid-level AI/ML engineer nationally, but sits below the top-of-market for senior AI engineers in major tech hubs ($170k–$220k+). The "first AI hire" positioning and bonus could compensate, and there is implicit upside if the function grows and you move into a lead role.

• Production LLM agents and agentic workflows (top-10 most sought-after skills in 2024–2025)
• Databricks ecosystem depth (Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, Mosaic AI)
• MCP server architecture and Claude/Anthropic tooling
• End-to-end ownership of data pipelines in a regulated (ad tech/consumer data) context

Green Flags: Clear 90-day and 6-month success metrics signal an organized hiring process. Cross-functional exposure (Data Science, Engineering, Business) builds well-rounded product instincts. Reusable component mandate prevents technical debt accumulation.

Red Flags to Watch: "Alongside day jobs" AI history means you may inherit undocumented, ad-hoc systems. Clarify in interviews how much time will be spent fixing legacy automations vs. building new ones.

Fluent is building the next generation advertising network:
Partner Monetize and Advertiser Acquisition. Our vision is to build an ML/AI first network of advertisers and publishers working toward a common objective, elevating relevancy in e-commerce for everyday shoppers.

Fluent is hiring its first dedicated AI Engineer. Over the past year, AI at Fluent has moved from pilots to production: a service desk agent that closes tickets without a human touch, a pipeline that cut modeled audience delivery from days to hours, and an agent that audits cross-system attribution and identifies revenue reconciliation opportunities. All of it was built by people doing it alongside their day jobs.

Your job is to make it your day job.

You will sit in Core Engineering and work every day with Data Engineering, Data Science, and Solution Architecture. You will build the agents and automated workflows our business teams have asked for, and you will build them on the Databricks lakehouse that is Fluent's data hub, because the hard part of most of these workflows is not the model — it is getting trusted data and reliable actions in front of it.

You are a builder who ships. You are strong in Python and SQL, you have put at least one LLM-powered application in front of real users, and you know the difference between a demo and a production system: evaluation, monitoring, cost, and a clear owner. You have worked in Databricks or a comparable lakehouse, or you have the data engineering depth to get productive there quickly.

You are comfortable sitting with a support lead or an account manager, understanding how they actually work, and turning that into something that runs every day.

This role is fully remote in the United States, with occasional travel to our New York headquarters.

• Ship production agents and automated workflows from a prioritized, business-validated backlog. Own each one from scoping with the business owner through build, deployment, monitoring, documentation, and handoff.
• Build the data foundation those workflows depend on in Databricks:
  Unity Catalog tables and views, Lakeflow pipelines, Lakeflow Connect ingestion from systems like Hub Spot, and Genie spaces that let business teams…