Applied AI Engineer

About Us
Catalyst Labs is a leading talent agency with a specialized vertical in Applied AI Machine Learning and Data Science. We stand out as an agency thats deeply embedded in our clients recruitment operations. We partner directly with: AI-first startups building products powered by LLMs generative AI intelligent automations Established tech companies: scaling their ML infrastructure recommendation systems and data platforms and Enterprise innovation teams integrating AI into traditional domains such as finance healthcare and logistics.

We collaborate directly with founders CTOs and Heads of AI in those themes who are driving the next wave of applied intelligence from model optimization to productized AI workflows. We take pride in facilitating conversations that align with your technical expertise creative problem-solving mindset and long-term growth trajectory in the evolving world of intelligent systems.

Our Client

Is reimagining how knowledge is shared. Theyre building a new medium for human connection: interactive digital minds that people can talk to learn from and be guided by.

The internet gave us static profiles and infinite feeds they create something profoundly different: living interactive identities that carry your voice judgment and worldview into every conversation. People dont just read about you they experience how you think.

Their mission is bold and generational in scope:

• Make human wisdom abundant personalized and discoverable.

• Preserve legacies unlock opportunity and scale brilliance across generations.
  

Trusted by thousands of the worlds most brilliant thinkers from Simon Sinek to Arnold Schwarzenegger and have tripled revenue users and mind interactions in the past six months all organically. Backed by Sequoia Capital Founders Fund Lux Capital and visionary angels including Michael Ovitz Gokul Rajaram and Olivia Wilde theyre now scaling rapidly toward the next frontier of AI-driven human expression.

Location:Jackson Square San Francisco

Work type: Fully on-site 5 days a week
Compensation: Above-market base equity benefits

Visa: Sponsorship available only for candidates already in the United States

The Role

As an Applied AI Engineer youll help architect the foundation of next-generation Mind Architecture the system that powers how digital minds learn reason and express individuality.

Unlike traditional RAG systems that treat data as a static collection of documents we build rich hierarchical knowledge graphs that mirror how real experts think capturing not just facts but relationships reasoning styles and conceptual depth.

Youll work at the intersection of graph systems LLM reasoning and scalable AI infrastructure bringing together symbolic structure and neural intelligence to redefine how knowledge lives digitally.

What Youll Do

Knowledge Graph & Mind Architecture

• Design and evolve the graph-based architecture that models a minds reasoning associations and conceptual hierarchies.
  

• Develop novel embeddings and contextual retrieval methods that make each mind distinct not just accurate but alive.
  

RAG & Context Innovation

• Build next-generation retrieval-augmented generation systems that integrate structured graph reasoning with neural retrieval.
  

• Implement and refine LLM evaluation frameworks to ensure each mind improves over time in quality consistency and individuality.
  

Applied AI & Performance

• Push the performance of frontier LLMs through advanced prompt engineering dynamic context shaping and evaluation-driven iteration.
  

• Architect efficient low-latency inference pipelines for thousands of simultaneous mind interactions.
  

Systems & Product Integration

• Bridge ML systems and product engineering shipping AI-powered features that shape user experience directly.
  

• Translate abstract research ideas into robust scalable production systems powering thousands of live digital minds.
  

Evals & Personalization

• Define success metrics for mind quality advancing tone style transfer and reasoning fidelity.
  

• Build systems that continuously refine a digital minds authenticity and expressiveness.

What You Bring

Core Expertise

• 4-6 years of experience in AI or ML engineering with at least 12 years hands-on with LLMs in production.
  

• Proven track record of building and deploying ML-powered systems that directly impact end-user experience.
  

• Strong Python expertise including asynchronous programming event loop optimization and performance tuning.
  

• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) context engineering and LLM eval frameworks.
  

• Deep practical understanding of how LLMs reason how to structure inputs and how to measure improvement.
  

Preferred / Bonus

• Experience with graph databases or graph-based retrieval (Neo4j ArangoDB or custom-built graph layers).
  

• Background in document understanding embeddings or multimodal context assembly.
  

• Familiarity with AWS distributed systems and scalable backend architecture.
  

• Hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs or building adapters for tone/style adaptation.
  

You are a great fit if

• You thrive on hard problems and are motivated by impact over title.
  

• Youre comfortable building at the intersection of research product and systems engineering.
  

• You have an engineers rigor a creators imagination and a philosophers curiosity.
  

Benefits

• Unlimited Learning Stipend: books courses or conferences of your choice.

• Comprehensive Health Dental and Vision coverage.

• 401(k) via Human Interest.

• Relocation assistance to San Francisco (if applicable).

• A creative high-agency culture that celebrates curiosity and deep thinking.

Other roles in Applied AI / ML in the US check them out here:

• Applied AI / ML engineer focusing on LLMs and Document processing: