Lead AI Engineer

Sierra Studio is an AI engineering studio and startup incubator – we turn our customers' ideas into reality! We're based in Los Angeles, but our teammates live all around the world. We create products across all areas of software — from web and mobile apps to cutting-edge work at the forefront of AI and large language models.

As a Lead AI Engineer, you'll lead engineering for one or more AI initiatives at Sierra. You'll architect the stack, prompt engineer LLMs to solve real world problems, and work with your teammates to ship great products you're proud of. You'll work closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to take products from idea to production. As an early employee at a startup, you'll also be part of creating our culture!

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  Client projects: Work with a startup founder to build the MVP of their idea

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  Internal projects: Build an internal AI tool to transform our own workflows

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  Hiring: Help us grow our team and interview future candidates

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  Leadership: Mentor other engineers to level up our team

We're looking for a lead engineer who has experience building great products with LLMs. Work experience, personal projects, or open source — any way you've built things counts.

If you're excited about this role but don't check every box, we'd love to see your application anyway.

• You've shipped something real with LLMs — at work, in a project, or in study

• Experience with prompt engineering, RAG, and agentic patterns

• Experience building evals for LLM-powered products

• Growth mindset: Ability to quickly learn new skills in the AI space

• Experience leading the technical direction of products — formally or informally (tech lead, mentoring, owning a project end-to-end)

• Ability to work effectively with product, design, and other partners

• Ability to contribute to multiple projects at the same time

• Comfortable communicating in English, written and verbal (our clients are US-based)

• Backend: Either Python (e.g. FastAPI) or TypeScript experience is nice to have!

• Experience with finetuning LLMs

• Curiosity about new developments in AI

• Uses AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc) to supercharge your own coding workflow

Fully remote, with flexible hours — we care about output, not hours online. We support work-life balance for teammates at every life stage.

• Growth mindset: We look to magnify our strengths, take chances, and always learn from our mistakes.

• Supportive: We keep our egos out of the workplace and support each other when trying new things.

• Product & customer centric: We care deeply about our customers and clients and always keep their needs top of mind. We build tech to solve real problems.

• Ownership: We take initiative, even when it is "not our job." As a startup, we all wear lots of hats.