Founding AI/ML Engineer

Who we are
Applied Retention is a Mumbai-based AI startup building the future of retention and lifecycle marketing in India.
Marketing today runs on events: a click, an abandoned cart, an email open. CEPs collect those events and let marketers build if/then journeys on top of them. But the problem was never data, it's decisioning. Brands sit on more customer data than ever, spread across warehouses, CRMs, and CEPs, yet the calls on who to talk to, what to offer, and when are still made by hand in segment builders. That's why personalization at scale still feels generic.
We're the intelligence layer between the data and the CEP. We model every customer individually, decide the right offer, channel, and moment, and hand that decision to the CEP to execute. As CACs rise and ROAS falls, this is how brands grow the lifetime value of the customers they spend so heavily to acquire, and scale sustainably.

What you'll build

• You're our founding engineer and you own the brain end to end. Genuinely AI-native, not a thin AI wrapper.
• Architect and build the decision engine: an LLM authors the strategy, and code executes it.
• Make LLMs reliable in production: constrained generation, structured output, evals for non-deterministic systems, hard cost ceilings. The model proposes, code acts.
• Build the full stack around it: Shopify and WhatsApp connectors, the scheduler and state machine, governance, and measurement we can defend.

Required

• You're obsessed with AI and extremely fluent in it. You ship fast, and the code is good.
• Deep expertise in Python, and in building and tuning AI tooling for orchestration and generation.
• You've built real things with frontier LLMs in production: orchestration, structured output, evals, cost control. Applied, not model research or side projects.
• You think in systems. A bug here opts a real customer out forever or burns the budget, and you build so it can't.
• You own ambiguous, no-playbook problems and want to.
• Roughly 4-7 years shipping serious software.
• Able to commute to our office in Chembur (4 minutes from Govandi station).

Preferred
Deployed ML in production
Early or founding engineer at a startup.
Built several AI side projects that he/she can show us

What you get
Found and own the AI and systems function at an early-stage AI retention startup.
Salary + Founding Engineer equity

Work Location: In person