Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Collectors is a technology company modernizing authentication, grading, vaulting, and trading services for collectible items. The Staff Applied AI Engineer will own an entire business domain's AI portfolio, build and deploy high-impact AI and agentic solutions end-to-end, and establish reusable patterns and measurable outcomes. The role also involves stakeholder leadership, production application engineering, and mentoring other engineers.
Responsibilities
- Own a business domain, not just a use case. You'll be accountable for the AI opportunity across an entire lane (for example Operations, Marketplace, or Finance): mapping the workflows, sizing the opportunities, and deciding what gets built, in what order, and why
- Build the hardest use cases yourself. You spend the majority of your time hands-on. You take the first, riskiest, or most technically demanding builds in your lane from prototype through production, adoption, and measured impact
- Turn one-off wins into reusable patterns. You notice when three builds share a shape, extract the common asset (a connector, an eval harness, a workflow pattern), and make it something every builder on the team can pick up
- Define success up front and prove it at portfolio level. You instrument outcomes before you build, and you can stand in front of the domain's leadership and account for the cumulative value your lane has delivered
- Design for earned autonomy. You build agents with the traces, evals, and human-in-the-loop gates that let them graduate to more autonomy on evidence, not on elapsed time, and you help set that standard for others
- Operate as a power user of frontier AI. Use Claude, OpenAI, and our orchestration platform daily as your primary tools, and bring a strong, current point of view on models, harnesses, and tooling that informs the team's platform choices
- Win trust at the leadership level. Your stakeholders are function leaders, not just operators. You navigate competing priorities, secure sponsorship, and keep skeptical partners engaged through delivery
- Multiply the builders around you. You review designs and code, unblock senior and mid-level engineers, raise the hiring bar as an interviewer, and make the people around you measurably better
- Build production grade applications around AI systems. You can design and implement the application layer around agents and AI workflows, with strong judgement across frontend APIs, state latency, reliability, security and scalability
Skills
- A builder, first and foremost. Seniority hasn't pulled you away from the keyboard. You're happiest hands-on, and you have a strong bias toward shipping over deliberating
- Proven at portfolio scope. You've owned a domain, program, or product area where you chose the roadmap, not just executed it, and you can speak to the judgment calls: what you built, what you deliberately didn't, and how it played out
- You've shipped multiple end-to-end agents. You've deployed agentic or AI-powered solutions to real users more than once, in more than one context, and you can speak concretely about value delivered, tools used, trade-offs made, and what you'd do differently now
- A power user of AI. You use Claude, OpenAI, or similar models daily and fluently, you push them harder than most of the people around you, and you have informed opinions about frameworks, evals, and orchestration that you can defend with evidence
- Fluent at turning business pain into working software. You're comfortable embedded inside non-technical teams, and you can translate a leader's strategic frustration, not just an operator's task-level one, into a scoped, sequenced portfolio
- Technically strong across the stack. You can architect and build agent systems independently, make sound build-versus-reuse calls, and hold your own in design review with principal-level engineers
- Proficient in application engineering, not just AI. You have hands-on experience building and shipping production applications, preferably full-stack, and can make sound architectural decisions across frontend and backend systems
- Outcome-obsessed. You talk in metrics and business value, not feature lists, and you hold yourself accountable for whether the portfolio moved the numbers, not just whether things shipped
- A force multiplier. You have a track record of making other engineers better through review, mentorship, patterns, or tooling, and people you've worked with would say so unprompted
- A clear communicator. You're equally comfortable with operators on the floor, engineers in review, and executives in a readout, and you can carry a room that started out skeptical
- A continuous learner. You believe staying excellent in this field means never standing still. You actively track the latest models, tools, and techniques as they ship, form your own view on what matters, and bring the best of it back to the team
Benefits
- All full-time employees are eligible to enroll in Medical, Dental, and Vision
- Full-time employees are eligible for fertility, commuter, and educational assistance benefits
- A competitive 401k matching plan
- All salaried employees are eligible for flexible time-off
- All regular, full-time employees are eligible for ten company paid holidays
- Employees receive discounts on select grading services for approved submissions
- Many of our teams offer flexible schedules with varying shifts and will work with you to accommodate your needs
- Team members are invited to participate in celebrations, holiday events, and team building activities
- This role may be eligible for bonuses, commissions, or other forms of compensation
Company Overview