Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Build AI that ships to real customers with the teams defining the category.

Key Talent Solutions partners with a portfolio of venture-backed, AI-native companies in San Francisco — pre-seed founders, fast-scaling seed teams, and category leaders already in production with paying customers. We're hiring across the full builder spectrum:
founding engineers, forward-deployed engineers, AI/ML core engineers, and full-stack product engineers.

One conversation, multiple doors. Tell us how you build and we'll match you to the room where you'll do your best work.

• Founding / early engineers — founder‑grade ownership at pre‑seed and seed AI startups. Scope it, build it, ship it, alongside the founders.
• Forward Deployed Engineers — sit at the seam between cutting‑edge AI and the customers who depend on it; embed with users and own delivery from first call to live system.
• AI / ML core engineers — retrieval, agentic workflows, evals, and fine‑tuning in real production environments, not research demos.
• Full‑stack product engineers — ship beautiful product fast, with a Linear/Attio-level taste bar and AI‑coding fluency.

• You’ve built and owned something in production — not just contributed to it
• AI shipped to real customers
  , or agentic systems pushed past RAG with real evals behind them
• Strong fundamentals — most seats sit in the 2–8 year range, but we’ll go earlier for a clearly exceptional builder and later for deep production AI depth
• A bias to ship, comfort with ambiguity, and a genuine engineering instinct (not scripting around problems)
• Based in or committed to San Francisco, on-site (select roles allow remote)

• Prior startup or founding experience — founding member, co‑founder, or unmistakable founder‑to‑be energy
• Document‑intelligence / multimodal background (the Hebbia / Reducto / Extend / Instabase / Roboflow lane)
• Agentic‑AI product background (the Sierra / Decagon / Harvey / Even Up lane)
• Pedigree (MIT / Stanford / Berkeley / CMU / Waterloo) or a frontier lab (Anthropic / OpenAI / Deep Mind) — a plus, ranked below real build/ship signal

$150K–$450K base + meaningful equity. Exact range and equity depend on the specific client, stage, and seniority — we’ll be straight with you about the band on the first call.

vibe‑coders, title‑seekers, pure‑research profiles with no production track record, big‑tech‑only backgrounds with vague “we built” ownership, and anyone who needs defined scope / tickets / process to move.