Forward Deployed AI Engineer

About Us

Essential AI’s mission is to deepen the partnership between humans and computers, unlocking collaborative capabilities that far exceed what could be achieved today. We believe that building delightful end-user experiences requires innovating across the stack - from the UX all the way down to models that achieve the best user value per FLOP.

We believe that a small, focused team of motivated individuals can create outsized breakthroughs. We are building a world-class multi-disciplinary team who are excited to solve hard real-world AI problems. We are well-capitalized and supported by March Capital and Thrive Capital, with participation from AMD, Franklin Venture Partners, Google, KB Investment, NVIDIA.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you will work directly with our customers to own and build LLM-powered solutions to some of the most valuable real-world problems at scale. You will own the deployment strategy and implementation and maintain Essential's product and its’ backend infrastructure in customers’ environments. To be successful in this role, you should deeply care about the customer's needs and build a thorough understanding of the product’s capabilities and limitations. You will have significant opportunities to advance Essential’s product capabilities and build general solutions to automate product deployment.

At Essential, we hold a high bar for identifying priorities, clearly communicating information, demonstrating a strong work ethic, and collaborating effectively as a team.

What you’ll be working on

• Developing software solutions for enterprise-level customers. You will guide, support, and implement solutions for customers, helping them maximize the value and adoption of our platform to address their complex business challenges.

• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to design and implement core infrastructure and systems powered by foundation models for enterprises' workflows.

• Explore, iterate, and build novel, useful, and elegant products that bring to life model capabilities through usable interfaces.

• Be deeply engaged with our customers to understand their requirements and iterate quickly with them to customize our product to their needs.

• Have a chance to guide and impact new kinds of software-enabled by LLMs to improve valuable enterprise workflows.

• Deploy and scale AI-powered products from the ground up while defining standards and protocols for monitoring, evaluation, security considerations, etc.

What we are looking for

• 6+ years of experience building distributed and scalable backend systems, with a focus on building and deploying software in other enterprises.

• Technical leadership and previous experience in building products in the 0 to 1 stage.

• We are seeking a technically savvy, business-minded, and customer-focused Solutions Architect to partner cross-functionally with research, engineering, infra teams, and enterprise customers.

• Experience with building high-performant backend systems in frameworks like Rust / Go / Typescript / Python.

• Experience with database technologies like MySQL / Postgres, Dynamodb, Redis, etc. and big data platforms like BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, etc.

• Experience with Restful and Graphql concepts.

• Have built production grade systems using GCP, AWS, Terraform or Kubernetes including deployment pipelines, streaming services, security management, etc.

• Have a desire to work directly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and excitement for engaging in cross-organizational collaboration, working through trade-offs, and balancing competing priorities

• The ability to navigate and execute amidst ambiguity to help your team, the customer and the end-user succeed.

• (Bonus) Experience building backends in a private cloud environment (VPCs, on-prem) is a plus.

• (Bonus) Experience working with generative or machine learning models.

We encourage you to apply for this position even if you don’t check all of the above requirements but want to spend time pushing on these techniques.

We are based in-person in SF and work fully onsite 5 days a week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

The base pay range target for the role seniority described in this job description is up to $225,000 in San Francisco, CA. Final offer amounts depend on various job-related factors, including where you place on our internal performance ladders, which is based on factors including past work experience, relevant education, and performance on our interviews and our benchmarks against market compensation data. In addition to cash pay, full-time regular positions are eligible for equity, 401(k), health benefits, and other benefits like daily onsite lunches and snacks; some of these benefits may be available for part-time or temporary positions.

Essential AI commits to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment, as well as equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. You may view all of Essential AI’s recruiting notices here, including our EEO policy, recruitment scam notice, and recruitment agency policy.