Applied AI Engineer
Applied AI Engineers build intelligent features into products by integrating LLMs, retrieval systems, and AI APIs to solve real business problems. Day-to-day, they prototype and productionize AI-powered workflows—from designing agent architectures and evaluation frameworks to implementing retrieval pipelines and optimizing inference costs at scale. They sit between product and infrastructure teams, combining hands-on engineering with deep customer collaboration to ship features that work reliably in production. Unlike ML Engineers who train models or Forward Deployed Engineers who embed at customer sites, Applied AI Engineers own the full stack of AI integration within their own organization's products, from architecture decisions to code contributions and technical mentorship.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Serving as a deep technical advisor to customers and partners, understanding their requirements and guiding them through product adoption and deployment
Designing and architecting scalable AI systems and workflows, including agent design and context engineering
Hands-on prototyping and pair programming with customer engineering teams to accelerate development
Creating technical documentation, tutorials, and sample code for developer audiences
Developing custom evaluation frameworks and benchmarks to assess AI system performance
Conducting code reviews and technical workshops to help customers build state-of-the-art AI products
Identifying patterns across customer engagements and contributing product insights back to internal teams
Designing and implementing AI agent architectures that integrate into production workflows
Optimizing costs and performance of large language model deployments in production environments
Building ecosystem-level tooling and infrastructure such as servers and reusable agent skills
Collaborating cross-functionally with product, engineering, research, and sales teams to align customer needs with technical solutions
Translating business requirements into technical architecture and product strategy recommendations
Communicating complex AI technical concepts to diverse stakeholders including non-technical executives
Building and maintaining strong relationships with customers through on-site visits and continuous engagement
Owning end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects with multiple moving parts
Identifying technical challenges unique to specific domains and contributing improvements back to product teams
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
32 open Applied AI Engineer jobs across 18 companies.
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