Applied AI Engineer

We’re looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help build the next generation of agentic systems. This role combines deep software engineering skills with an experimental mindset around how AI can be practically applied to solve real user problems.

You’ll collaborate across product, research, and engineering to design agents that reason, interact with environments and evolve through feedback. Ideal candidates bring curiosity, a love of ambiguous problems, and hands-on experience applying LLMs in production.

• Build autonomous and semi-autonomous agent workflows that interact with browsers, codebases, and APIs to complete complex content operations.
• Evaluate model behavior in live environments and pioneer approaches for applying reinforcement learning to end-to-end agent systems.
• Design modular frameworks for tools, memory, and evaluators to enable continuous learning and improvement of agents.
• Develop data pipelines to collect, transform, and annotate real-world usage data for SFT and RL training.
• Design and build proprietary agent libraries, prompting strategies and benchmarking frameworks.
• Partner with customers and internal stakeholders to understand edge cases and align AI behaviors with user expectations.

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, with at least a year working directly on AI/ML-powered applications. 
• Strong fluency in AI tooling (e.g. OpenAI APIs, Anthropic APIs). 
• Practical understanding of LLMs, prompt engineering and agentic architectures.
• Experience building production systems that integrate external environments - code execution, browser automation or API orchestration.
• High degree of ownership and comfort in experimental, fast-moving environments.

• Familiarity with benchmarks like SWE-bench or evaluation strategies for tool-using agents.
• Exposure to customer-facing roles or user research for AI product development.
• Background in reinforcement learning or data-centric AI approaches.

• Learn quickly, actively seek out new challenges, and regularly reconsider “how it’s always been done.”
• Have an innate drive for being 1% better than the day before, building towards greatness.
• Embrace AI as a core tool for problem-solving, innovation, and scale.
• Show customer-obsession (internal or external), high ownership/accountability, and bias for action.
• Communicate clearly, directly, with curiosity, and assuming good intentions.
• Thrive in fast-paced, hyper-growth environments where building better > maintaining status quo.

As an AI-first company, we prioritize AI literacy as a core competency in our hiring decisions. We’re excited by candidates who thoughtfully apply AI tools in their work, but during interviews we’re focused on you. This is your opportunity to show how you think, communicate, and solve problems. Over-reliance on AI-generated responses during the interview process (especially when it obscures your own voice) will result in disqualification. We want to understand your unique perspective and how you approach challenges, both with and without AI.

Gradial is dedicated to creating an environment where diverse perspectives are valued and all team members can grow. We offer competitive compensation, equity, flexible work hours, comprehensive benefits, and a collaborative culture focused on learning and impact.