Founding AI​/ML Engineer

About Gem

Gem is the only AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. It brings together your ATS, CRM, sourcing, scheduling, and analytics — plus 800+ million profiles to source from — with AI built into every workflow. By eliminating the headaches of juggling multiple tools, Gem helps customers boost recruiter productivity by up to 5x while saving 30-50% on technology costs. Over 1,000 organizations — from startups to industry leaders like Zillow, Door Dash, and Asana — trust Gem to fuel their growth.

With an industry-leading 4.8/5 rating on G2, Gem is the platform recruiters actually love to use. Gem has raised $148M from renown investors including Accel, Greylock, ICONIQ, Sapphire, and Meritech.

With Gem, you can experience the power of a truly connected recruiting platform — one consistent interface, unified data, smarter AI recommendations, and simplified permissions. Our customers achieve remarkable results.

Just as we strive to help our customers find great talent, we also invest in our own people and culture. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and have recently been recognized as:

• Forbes America s Best Startup Employers 2025
• Great Place to Work Certified, 2024
• Fortune Best Workplaces for Millennia ls, 2023

We work in our San Francisco office three days per week. In-person collaboration is core to how we ship quickly and build great products together.

We re looking for a senior or staff AI/ML Engineer to design and ship production-grade AI features that transform how companies hire. You ll be one of the first AI/ML engineers at Gem, shaping both the technology and how we build. You ll work on challenges like building intelligent search systems that surface perfect candidates from massive talent pools, creating AI tools that help recruiters craft personalized outreach, and extracting insights from candidate profiles and recruiting activity.

You ll own your work end-to-end, from prototype to production, and iterate quickly based on real recruiter feedback.

Recruiting is an industry ripe for AI transformation. Unlike chatbots or summarization tools, our AI directly impacts whether companies succeed or fail by finding them exceptional talent.

• Build multi-step reasoning systems that understand nuanced recruiter queries like  senior ML engineers who ve worked at YC companies and know PyTorch  – currently processing 800M+ profiles
• Develop intelligent search that understands recruiter intent and surfaces the right candidates instantly
• Ship rapidly and iterate by moving from prototype to production, measuring performance, and refining based on live product data and user feedback
• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers in our SF office to create cohesive AI-driven experiences
• Share ML expertise with teammates and help establish best practices for model development and evaluation

Core technical skills:

• Experience applying AI/ML in production environments, especially with LLMs
• Hands-on knowledge of retrieval and search systems, including query understanding, ranking, and relevance optimization
• Familiarity with vector databases and embedding models for AI applications
• Understanding of retrieval architectures and their implementation
• Pragmatic approach to AI. You find the right balance between cutting-edge techniques and scalable, maintainable solutions

How you work:

• Problem-solving: You approach problems holistically, starting with clear understanding of context. You navigate ambiguity well, decompose complex problems into clean solutions, and think critically about real-world impact
• Shipping quality products: You partner closely with product and design to craft experiences that feel effortless. You understand the balance between craft, speed, and business impact
• Communication and collaboration: You explain technical concepts clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. You engage thoughtfully in disagreements and compromise when needed
• Velocity and ownership: You re excited by quick experimentation and continuous improvement. You take pride in shipping features from start to finish
• User focus: You care about business impact and…