Applied AI Engineer — Pointer

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite, 5 days/week)
Compensation: $180,000 – $250,000 base + competitive equity
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1 supported
Experience Level: 0–4 years
Employment Type: Full-Time

Pointer builds AI systems that operate computers like humans — navigating browsers, processing documents, and interacting with legacy enterprise software. Their focus is enterprise finance automation, specifically replacing labor-heavy BPO workflows that historically resisted software automation.

Pointer recently raised a $6M seed round from Amplify Partners (early investors in Datadog and Modal). Current team size is six in San Francisco. Existing enterprise customers include a $2B property management company automating AP and invoice workflows and a major Belgian retailer automating reconciliation across legacy systems.

This is a deeply hands-on applied AI engineering role focused on the intelligence layer behind Pointer's automation platform. This is explicitly a research-to-production role — not a pure research role.

Core ownership includes:

• Browser agent reliability
• Document understanding systems
• Inference optimization
• Adaptive self-healing AI systems
• Fine-tuning pipelines for customer-specific workflows
• Production AI experimentation
• Latency optimization via routing, quantization, caching, and model selection
• State-of-the-art automation performance across UI interaction, tool use, and unstructured parsing

• Strong Python expertise
• Strong PyTorch fluency
• Applied ML engineering experience shipping production systems
• Metrics-driven evaluation mindset
• Comfortable working with messy real-world data
• Ability to clearly explain systems you personally built
• End-to-end production ownership
• Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco 5 days per week

• Reinforcement learning experience
• Retrieval systems / RAG
• Agentic systems and browser agents
• Inference optimization and fine-tuning pipelines
• Model monitoring and production LLM systems
• Applied AI workflow engineering
• Research lab exposure (SAIL, BAIR, MIT CSAIL, etc.)
• Published ML research or meaningful open-source contributions

Strong signals include candidates from Ramp, Databricks, Scale AI, Stripe, selective technical startups (Series A–D), and strong research + shipping hybrid backgrounds.

• Buzzword-heavy resumes with no substance
• Candidates unable to clearly explain what they built
• Scripted communication styles
• Research-only candidates with no production delivery

1. Initial behavioral conversation
2. Technical deep dive focused on real systems built
3. Take-home assessment
4. Paid onsite work trial (1–2 days, travel covered)
5. Offer

• Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — 5 days/week — please only apply if you can commit to this
• H-1B and O-1 visa sponsorship available

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Pointer.