Lead Applied Ai Engineer

## About the Role We're hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own the AI surface of GPTease — an AI-powered chat platform for content creators. This is a senior IC role. You'll partner with our eng lead and product lead to own the AI layer end-to-end, from agent architecture to evaluation to vendor strategy. AI behavior is your primary surface, but we're hiring for engineering judgment over framework depth. This isn't a "wire up another RAG demo" role. RAG isn't the frontier anymore. We want someone who can look at where applied AI is going — agentic systems, eval-driven iteration, fine-tuning where it matters — and figure out which moves are right for our product and our creators. This role is for you if you've already been the most senior AI engineer on a team, have led an AI surface end-to-end, and are comfortable making architectural and product calls without waiting for permission. You'll own: - Agent architecture and the next phases of AI behavior in our product - Evaluation infrastructure — quality metrics, model comparison, regression testing - System prompts and persona behavior across the chat product - Multi-provider inference routing and the AI vendor stack - Memory, retrieval, and vision pipelines ## Must-haves - 5+ years shipping production applied AI / LLM systems, with at least 2 of those as the senior AI engineer on a team - Built or led agent systems — planning, tool use, multi-step reasoning. You've designed agent flows, not just used a framework. - Strong eval design instincts. You've shipped a model or prompt change that moved a metric, not just tried a prompt. - Fluent with multi-provider inference routing and AI vendor evaluation. You've made real cost-versus-quality tradeoffs in production. - Strong TypeScript / Node fluency - Comfortable across the stack when needed (Supabase edge functions, queues, scripting) - Currency in the field. You read papers and release notes because that's how you operate, not because someone asked. ## Bonus Points - Vision / multimodal production work - Fine-tuning experience (LoRA, DPO, IPO) - OSS contributions in eval, agent, or inference frameworks - Production work on a creator-economy product - Familiarity with the 18+ creator economy ## Tech Stack - Next.js 14 (App Router) - TypeScript - Supabase (Postgres + Edge Functions) - OpenRouter - Mem0 - Qdrant - LoRA fine-tuning pipeline - Vercel - AWS Lambda - PostHog - Sentry ## What We Offer - High-ownership role in a growing AI product - Small, fast-moving team, your work ships to real users quickly - Competitive contract rate (India-based)