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Applied AI Engineer

Seattle, WA

Posted: 08/13/2026 Industry: Engineering Job Number: 3652644 Pay Rate: 200000/year - 250000/year

Job Description


Applied AI Engineer

Location: Seattle (hybrid)

Type: Full-time

Reports to: Head of Engineering

Compensation: $200, 000–$250, 000 base salary, plus a 15–20% target bonus, plus equity. We'll walk you through the full structure in process.

Our process: Initial screen → take-home exercise and presentation → final round with onsite.

About Us

We're building an agentic, AI-native consumer product that will be used by millions of people to make complex, high-consideration purchases online. Today's tools for these kinds of decisions are fragmented, transactional, and introduce friction at every step. We exist to know our users deeply, shoulder that complexity, and apply real judgment on their behalf, so these moments become more personal and more valuable over time.

We are building something that has not existed before, and we are a small, senior team (currently ~15, growing to ~28 by year-end), backed by one of the world's largest consumer companies. We are here to do the best work of our careers.

Role overview

We are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to build out the intelligent AI layer of our agentic consumer experience. This is a senior role that takes cutting-edge techniques and state-of-the-art research and applies them to delightful, large-scale consumer products.

We're a small, fast-moving team right now, heads-down on shipping. We're looking for someone additive from day one: broadly capable, comfortable operating with real autonomy, and energized by ambiguity rather than needing it resolved for them.

You will work on
  • Our agentic AI layer, including:
  • Prompting and orchestration
  • Multi-step, stateful agentic workflows
  • Tool-calling architectures with clear guardrails
  • Consent-aware long-term memory systems
  • Persona extraction and structured context modeling
  • Autonomous purchase and transaction optimization logic
  • Real-time monitoring and autonomous intervention systems
  • Evaluation frameworks for model selection, quality, cost, safety, and determinism

Qualifications

We're looking for someone who has:
  • A Master's degree (or higher) in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience that demonstrates the same depth
  • 5+ years of experience training large-scale deep learning models and LLMs — this is a floor, not a target
  • Shipped large-scale AI systems to real users, not prototypes or internal tools
  • Experience going well beyond building generic LLM wrappers — genuine depth in the model layer itself
  • The ability to translate research into reliable, safe, production-grade systems
  • Experience building evaluation frameworks and harnesses for agentic workflows
  • A generalist mindset — we need someone who can operate broadly across the AI stack, not a narrow specialist in one sub-domain
  • Strong communication skills and the judgment to operate with real autonomy in a small, fast-moving team

We prefer candidates with experience in our technologies and architectural patterns, which include:
  • Frontier language models (commercial and open-weight)
  • Cloud and serverless infrastructure (AWS, Vercel, etc.)
  • Durable workflow engines (Temporal, etc.)
  • LLM observability/evaluation platforms (Braintrust, LangSmith, etc.)
  • Persistent memory systems
  • Relational and vector databases for durable state
  • AI runtimes with streaming and tool execution

How we work
  • Company of builders. Everyone here operates like an owner, with high autonomy and high accountability.
  • Generalists over specialists. At our stage, we need people who can move across problems, not narrowly scoped experts.
  • In-person. We build together in Seattle, hybrid.

Who is Rainier Recruiting

Rainier Recruiting is a boutique, award winning national staffing agency and executive search firm. Using an approach that “treats every candidate like an executive search”, we offer positions in contract-to-hire, Full-Time, and executive search. Named the #1 Best Workplace in Washington State in 2022, recognized as a ClearlyRated Best of Staffing firm, and identified as a top recruitment firm by multiple business journals, Rainier Recruiting is fast becoming a respected company. We are no longer the “best recruiters you have never heard of”. Rainier Recruiting is also proud to share our clients have a 93% repeat business rate. Rainier Recruiting is an equal opportunity employer and service provider and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, sexual orientation, disability, political affiliation or belief, or any other protected class. We are committed to the principles of Equal Opportunity Employment and are dedicated to making employment decisions based on merit and value, for ourselves, our client companies, and for the candidates we represent. We engage in socially conscious business practices and believe that diverse, equitable, inclusive, and non-biased talent and recruitment processes are foundational to the success of every organization that we partner with.

Meet Your Recruiter

Max Wisman
Partnerships Manager

Max recently joined Rainier Recruiting as a Partnerships Manager, where he partners with technology, manufacturing and professional services companies to build out their go to market and technical teams. He brings a blend of agency recruiting and enterprise software sales that is uncommon in the search industry. Max spent six plus years on the agency side, along with a year of in house recruiting for a Seattle area software company. He then spent six years on the software side of the table, selling into everything from SMB to Enterprise. That combination helps Max understand both sides of a search, what it actually takes to close a strong candidate and what the hiring leader on the other end is being measured on.

Max grew up in the Puget Sound area and is a Central Washington University alum. He traded the rain for the sun in 2020 and now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife and two dogs, Martin and Quincy. In his free time, he enjoys watching the Seahawks and Suns (until the Sonics come back) and staying active, including pickleball and golf with friends.

 
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