Senior Software Engineer - AI Products

About Gem

• Forbes America's Best Startup Employers 2026
• Great Place to Work Certified, 2024
• Fortune Best Workplaces for Millennials, 2023

About the Role

What You’ll Build

• Model work: fine-tuning LLMs and embedding models for recruiting queries, testing new providers as they launch, building systems to evaluate what actually improves search quality
• Search at scale: making semantic search instant across 800M+ profiles, integrating rerankers to surface better candidates, designing the feedback loops that help search get smarter
• Data infrastructure: owning pipelines in Snowflake that feed our models, cleaning and structuring candidate data, building the systems that let us experiment quickly without breaking production
• Shipping full-stack features: writing the code from prompt engineering to UI, creating interfaces that make complex search feel simple, iterating based on what recruiters actually tell us

What You Bring

• You have 5+ years of industry experience as a software engineer, building user-facing products.
• You enjoy mentoring, working cross-functionally, and working directly with customers.
• You move with velocity and invest in improving your craft.
• You prioritize technical quality, building reliable and scalable systems.
• You are product-oriented and you don’t hesitate in making decisions.
• You are energized by collaborating in-office with your peers in a hybrid model.

• You've built agents or worked on eval infrastructure
• You know your way around vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant) or search systems (Elasticsearch)
• You've worked with RAG architectures or ML observability
• You've worked at an early-stage startup where you had to figure things out yourself
• Background in information retrieval, ranking, NLP, or recommendation systems
• Experience with data pipelines (Snowflake, dbt), model deployment, or monitoring models in production
• Comfortable in Python and working with ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow

How We Work

• Local dev with Vite boots instantly with hot-reload
• CI runs in ~10 minutes, deploys go straight to production
• We ship fast and iterate based on customer feedback

• Reasonable hours
• Weekly team events and happy hours
• Regular hackathons for experimental features
• Team from Meta, Uber, and Dropbox

Benefits

• 10-year stock option exercise window
• Flexible Time Off and 16 paid holidays (including company wellness days)
• Best-in-class medical, dental, and vision coverage
• $1,200 annual learning and development stipend
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for all parents, plus $1,500 new-parent perk and flexible return-to-work options

Role Details

• Location: This role is based 3 days per week out of our San Francisco HQ and is not eligible for full-time remote work.
• Compensation: The annual cash compensation range for this position is $190,000–$260,000 based on level in addition to equity & benefits.