Applied AI Engineer

About the company Our client is a small software company. The role Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Design and deliver production AI features that take over intricate, document-heavy business processes. Carry projects from early experiments through to live release and ongoing refinement, partnering closely with founders and subject-matter experts. Contribute to the direction of the product through hands-on learning. What you'll do - Design and develop LLM-driven agent applications that automate multi-step financial processes. - Take responsibility for the full lifecycle: prototyping, evaluation, release, monitoring and continuous improvement based on user feedback. - Judge when plain rule-based code, assisted AI flows or fully autonomous agents best fit a given problem. - Sit alongside founders and domain experts to watch real work being done, spot weaknesses in the agent's context or design, and deliver fixes. - Build AI capabilities into the user experience so they feel natural and enjoyable to use, not just strong on technical metrics. - Help steer the product roadmap using what you learn from hands-on work with agent-based approaches. Requirements What we're looking for - Roughly 1.5 to 4 years of professional software engineering experience in production environments, ideally at a high-growth startup or respected technology firm. - Prior experience as a founder, early employee or engineer in an early-stage company. - A history of creating new systems yourself rather than mainly wiring together existing tools. - Hands-on applied AI experience with LLMs, agents, retrieval or document-processing applications. - Ability to turn loosely defined problems into deployed solutions with measurable results. - Comfort collaborating directly with subject-matter experts. - Availability to work in person at the New York office. Bonus points - Background in finance or other regulated sectors that rely heavily on documents. - For earlier-career candidates, a strong academic background from a leading university. Benefits Compensation and benefits - Base salary: USD 200,000 to 300,000 per year - Equity - Relocation support Location and work model - New York, NY, USA - On-site, 4-5 days per week in the office - Full-time