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Sr. Applied AI Engineer
Vantaca
RaleighHybrid4w ago
- Employment
- Full-time
- Seniority
- Senior
About the role
- Our Implementation and CE teams have a validated backlog of high-value AI builds — risk surfacing, workflow intelligence, client coaching, configuration assistance — and no dedicated engineering resources to execute on them. You change that.
- Design and ship ML and LLM systems spanning supervised models that predict and rank, retrieval and generation systems that draft and summarize, and agentic workflows that act on internal data
- Build evaluation infrastructure alongside every system — define success criteria before writing code, measure whether the system worked, and catch regressions before users do
- Architect RAG, retrieval, and context engineering patterns that let LLMs operate reliably on internal knowledge and production data
- Reason rigorously about modeling choices — label definition, leakage, time-aware splits, calibration, precision-at-k vs AUC, when a heuristic baseline beats a model
- Work directly in Databricks and Unity Catalog — understand the operational data, write the SQL, and build systems that act on it
- Own deployment and monitoring for everything you ship — feature drift, outcome tracking, LLM eval regression, retraining cadence, rollback paths
- Treat data governance and access scoping as design constraints, not afterthoughts
- Maintain versioned, traceable LLM workflows — prompts and context patterns that are reusable, not one-off
- Production experience shipping both classical ML and LLM systems — strong opinions on when to use which
- An eval-first mindset — you don't trust a system you haven't measured, and you build the measurement before the model
- Fluency in a data warehouse environment — SQL, time-aware feature engineering, leakage discipline
- Production scars — you've watched a model degrade in the wild, seen a label loop bias itself, caught an LLM provider regression with the prompt unchanged
- Cost intuition — you can napkin-math the unit economics of an LLM workflow before committing to it
- Ability to scope work in partnership with non-technical stakeholders, translating their pain into a buildable system
- Comfort with distinguishing the business metric from the model metric, and arguing for the right one
- You use AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent) as a core part of your daily workflow. Not occasionally. As a thinking partner and execution accelerator.
- Python proficiency as your primary build language for automation and scripting
- Full-stack range: comfortable building APIs, automations, integrations, and lightweight UIs without needing a separate front-end resource
- SQL and data fluency: you will work regularly in our data warehouse and need to understand and act on operational data directly
- API integration experience: REST, webhooks, OAuth
- RAG and retrieval system experience: chunking, embedding strategies, retrieval quality, hallucination mitigation
- Prompt and context engineering: you understand why context boundaries matter and have a strategy for what to persist vs. retrieve
- DevOps fundamentals: CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerization. You ship and maintain what you build.
- AI/ML background is required; CS or AI/ML academic track preferred
- Spec-first by default: you write detailed intent documents before building. Resistance to structured planning upfront is a disqualifier for this role.
- Bias toward shipping: you prefer a v1 in two weeks over architecting a v3 for two months
- Product sense for non-technical users: you can translate operational pain into a scoped technical solution without requiring a detailed spec from the person who has the problem
- Comfortable as the first and only: you are energized by operating as the sole AI engineer in a domain, without a peer engineering org to lean on day to day
- Builder, not buyer: you build internal tooling and do not stitch together SaaS products
- Security-aware: you ask about access scoping and data classification before you build, not after
- Comfortable with ambiguity: requirements will shift; you orient toward the outcome
- Strong written communicator: you document your intent before you build and leave clear records of what you built and why
- Always Growing: Likes change and enjoys finding new ways to improve their knowledge and the product. Always ready to learn quickly, helping themselves and the team grow.
- Win as a Team: Builds trust and works together by making sure everyone communicates well. Actively involved in daily work, working closely with the team, listening to their ideas, and celebrating successes together.
- Accountability Starts with Me: Notices problems and takes personal action to solve them.
- Unwavering Commitment to Customer Experience: Regularly talks to residents and management companies, taking personal responsibility to understand what they need, address concerns, and make their experience better with improved Vantaca processes.
- Innovate Boldly: We challenge the status quo and push boundaries to create meaningful change. We act with urgency and purpose, knowing that innovation drives our success.
- Build consumer products that millions use. Shape how homeowners across the country interact with their communities every day.
- AI-First Product Culture with access to cutting-edge tools and autonomy to experiment.
- Our eNPS is +68! (Google it, that is great)
- Benefits: Medical, Dental, and Vision kick in day one
- Unlimited PTO (with a requirement for employees to take a minimum of one continuous week per year)
- 401K with Company Match
- Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed
- Great parental leave benefits
- Unicorn-stage growth: $1.25B valuation, $300M Series C, scaling from 275 to 400+ employees
- Named on Inc 5000 list of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies
- Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row
- Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category
- Active employee-led Culture Committee
- Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees
- Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community
- We're playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We're building something cool and people like it here.
Perks & benefits
- 401k
- Unlimited Vacation
- Paid Time Off
- Pension Matching
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