Founding Staff ML AI Engineer
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Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
18 days ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
Role:Founding Staff ML / AI Engineer
Location:San Francisco CA.
Hybrid. Full time.
About the job:
Advantra is partnering with a Series A AI software startup in San Francisco to hire a Founding Staff ML / AI Engineer to build and scale AI systems that automate retail brand operations.
About the role:
You will design and implement AI and ML systems that help brands automate accounting planning and retail operations. You will build LLM-based agents predictive models and anomaly detection systems that power real-world retail decisions. You will work closely with product and engineering teams to translate AI capabilities into usable software for large-scale retail brands.
Responsibilities:
- Build agentic systems that retrieve and process data from legacy and modern systems.
- Develop NLP and LLM pipelines to extract insights from complex documents.
- Design predictive models for brand sales forecasting.
- Implement anomaly detection models to optimize retail operations.
- Create recommendation systems for promotions and marketing strategies.
- Collaborate with product and engineering teams to integrate AI models into software.
- Establish ML best practices for development testing and deployment.
- Mentor and guide junior engineers on AI and ML projects.
- Evaluate and implement new AI technologies and frameworks.
Core requirements:
- 5 years of applied AI/ML experience in production environments.
- Proven experience building ML systems in a startup or fast-paced environment.
- Experience fine-tuning LLMs such as LLaMA or GPT.
- Hands-on experience designing AI prompt workflows.
- Strong understanding of ML system design and engineering best practices.
- Proficiency in Python and relevant ML frameworks (PyTorch TensorFlow JAX).
- Experience with data pipelines feature engineering and model deployment.
- Ability to bridge AI capabilities with real-world product requirements.
- Track record of shipping AI/ML features used by end-users.
- Strong problem-solving skills and independent project ownership.
Nice to have:
- Experience with AI agents or autonomous systems.
- Familiarity with retail or brand operations software.
- Knowledge of cloud ML services (AWS SageMaker GCP Vertex AI).
- Experience with advanced recommendation systems.
- Understanding of multi-modal AI (text images structured data).
How to apply:
Email with links to shipped work and a short note on what you owned. Company name shared after the intro.
About Us;
Advantra-Upstart Crew is a search program inside Advantra Consulting. We partner with early stage and high growth startups to hire the top 2% in Tech and GTM. We run end to end searches from single role headhunts to full team build outs using domain experts and a vetted network to deliver tight shortlists. We stay close to founders and candidates so the relationship lasts beyond the first hire.
Key Skills
- Computer Science
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Python
- VMware
- C/C++
- Go
- System Architecture
- gRPC
- OS Kernels
- Perl
- Distributed Systems
