Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Headstart builds production AI systems for enterprises across industries and business contexts. The Senior Applied AI Engineer will own client engagements end-to-end, translate ambiguous business problems into technical solutions, ship reliable AI systems, contribute to internal AI platforms, and help raise engineering standards.
Responsibilities
- Own client engagements end-to-end, from technical discovery and scoping through to production
- Work directly with enterprise clients, translating ambiguous business problems into concrete technical scope
- Ship production AI systems across multiple domains and stacks: agents, LLM workflows, document processing, and the infrastructure that makes them reliable
- Contribute to Friday and the Headstart Platform via patterns, skills, and infrastructure that compound across every engagement
- Raise the bar for the engineers around you through code review, pairing, and shared standards
Skills
- • 5+ years of engineering experience with a track record of owning systems end-to-end
- • Comfortable in client-facing situations, running discovery, earning trust quickly, and shaping what gets built
- • Your instincts and standards are contagious and teammates adopt them naturally
- • You use AI tools constantly, creatively, and with good judgment about when not to
- • Experience designing distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, or developer productivity infrastructure at scale
- • Bonus if you've been a founding engineer or startup early hire, with history building production products from scratch
- • Bonus if you're NYC based — we have a loft office in Soho and provide lunch and snacks
- • Proven full-stack depth: backend services (Python), datastores (SQL/NoSQL), optionally React/Next.js
Benefits
- Competitive equity compensation
- 401k with employer match
- Fully covered medical, dental, and vision premiums
- Monthly wellness stipend
- Free lunch every day in our NYC office
- Citi Bike + pre-tax commuter benefits
- 12 weeks parental leave with an optional 4-week ramp-up at a 50% schedule
- Fully remote work for candidates based in the US or Canada for the right fit
- Remote-friendly culture to support those outside of NYC
Company Overview