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 renowned investors including Accel, Greylock, ICONIQ, Sapphire and Meritech.

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 will 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.

• Build multi‑step reasoning systems that understand nuanced recruiter queries such as ‘senior ML engineers who have 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 a 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 prioritize accordingly. You think critically about how your work shapes real people’s daily workflows.

• Prior startup experience (especially 0→1 product).
• Prompt and context engineering skills or experience with LLM fine‑tuning.
• Background in information retrieval, NLP or recommendation systems.
• Experience implementing feedback loops to improve search quality over time.
• Track record of shipping AI features that balance product craftsmanship with technical rigor.

• Local development with Vite boots instantly with hot‑reload.
• CI finishes in about 10 minutes, and commits deploy to production immediately.
• We ship quickly and iterate based on customer feedback.
• Reasonable working hours.
• Weekly team activities and happy hours.
• Regular hackathons where we build experimental features.
• Work with a world‑class team from Meta, Uber…