Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Title: Lead Machine Learning EngineerLocation: San Francisco (Hybrid)Compensation: Up to $350,000 + EquityWe’re partnered with a well-funded early-stage startup rethinking how designers build in the AI era, backed by top-tier investors and operators from leading AI and technology companies. They’re building a next-generation design platform powered by LLMs, focused on helping product teams move from idea to production faster through intelligent, AI-driven workflows.This is a foundational, high-ownership role where you’ll define and scale AI systems across the product. You’ll operate at the intersection of models, systems, and product, turning cutting-edge AI capabilities into reliable, measurable user-facing features.What You’ll DoOwn AI architecture and technical direction across the productBuild and ship production-grade LLM features with clear quality and performance metricsDesign and optimize AI pipelines across prompting, retrieval, agents, and evaluationLead development of agentic systems and multi-step tool use workflowsEstablish standards for model evaluation, benchmarking, and observabilityPartner closely with product, design, and engineering to ship high-impact AI featuresRequirements5+ years of software engineering experience2+ years working with LLM APIs and prompt engineering in productionStrong proficiency in TypeScript or Node.js and PythonExperience with LLM evaluation, benchmarking, and performance measurementHands-on experience with fine-tuning (LoRA, full fine-tuning, distillation)Experience building agent-based AI systemsAbility to own systems end-to-end in a fast-paced environmentWhat You’ll BuildFine-tuned models for design-to-code generationCustom smaller models tailored to specific design workflowsMulti-step AI agent systems with tool useReal-time, streaming AI experiencesContext-aware code generation and intelligent suggestionsIf you're interested in building AI-native products that directly shape how modern teams design and build software, this is a rare chance to have early, meaningful impact on both the product and technical direction.