Hiring an AI Engineer - Build Toward a $100M+ Exit | Long-Term Paid Role

We’re looking for a senior Applied AI Engineer with deep experience designing, building, and shipping AI-powered products and agentic systems - someone who can help shape our technical direction and play a key role in scaling the business. This is a long-term, paid opportunity, with compensation in USD through Upwork. Our goal is to reach $10M ARR within 12 months and position the company for a $100M+ acquisition. What you’ll work on We have several active projects and working AI systems. We need someone who can turn promising prototypes into reliable production products - and make sound decisions about the models, architecture, and infrastructure behind them. Your initial focus will be our conversational agents. Over time, you’ll help us build and improve AI workflows, tool-using agents, knowledge systems, and integrations across the business. You’ve taken AI prototypes or vibe-coded demos and turned them into reliable, production-grade systems. That includes: - Designing agent harnesses, context management, tool use, and reliable execution. - Choosing when to use AI, deterministic code, retrieval, or simpler approaches. - Building evaluations and tracing to understand failures and verify improvements. - Balancing model capability, cost, latency, and operational reliability. - Simplifying AI-generated implementations into maintainable production systems. We’re not training models from scratch. We need someone who combines practical AI experience with strong software engineering - and knows when to use the model versus deterministic code. Who we’re looking for You’ve shipped production AI systems beyond tutorials and demos. You understand context engineering, prompts, tool calling, knowledge retrieval, and evaluations—and can explain the tradeoffs behind your decisions. You’re comfortable improving an existing system, working quickly with AI, and keeping the architecture clean without overengineering it. Our stack includes OpenRouter, n8n, Chatwoot, TypeScript, Convex, and API integrations. We manage work in Linear. Proven experience shipping reliable agents matters more than an exact stack match. Who you’ll work with We’ve been founders and entrepreneurs for over 12 years, built and sold multiple companies, led AI initiatives for Goldman Sachs and Google Ventures-backed startups, and helped scale Mistral AI’s GTM operations as its valuation grew from $3M to $14B. Previously, I was Head of AI at LeanScale, which has one of the largest YouTube channels in B2B technology. What we offer - Paid, long-term work with technical leadership and meaningful responsibility for architectural decisions. - Unlimited Covered AI token expenses, relevant tools, and continued education. - Learning & Exposure to the fastest growing startups in the world. If you work through an agency, we’d prefer someone dedicated to our account for a long-term partnership. When you apply Tell us about an AI system you’ve shipped, what you personally built, and one production problem you encountered—how you diagnosed it, fixed it, and verified the improvement. Conversational-agent examples are especially relevant to our initial priorities. Proof of work is a huge plus. We’d love to hear why this opportunity interests you.