Applied AI Engineer

Overview Item.com is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to build production AI applications that solve concrete business problems. You will combine software engineering, LLM/ML application design, data integration, evaluation, and production operations.

Responsibilities

• Ship AI applications that deliver measurable operational or customer value.
• Establish repeatable approaches for evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and improvement.
• Help move AI work from prototype to maintainable product capability.
• Design and implement AI application services using Python and/or TypeScript.
• Build retrieval, classification, extraction, summarization, and decision-support capabilities as appropriate.

Minimum Requirements:

• Strong software engineering experience with production services, APIs, testing, and cloud deployment.
• Practical experience shipping LLM/ML-enabled applications, not only experimenting with models.
• Experience with retrieval, embeddings, vector/data stores, prompt/version management, or model evaluation is valuable.
• Ability to explain data quality, model/application tradeoffs, fallback behavior, and production incidents.
• Clear ownership mindset and ability to work from ambiguous problems to operating software.

Preferred Requirements:

• Develop data pipelines, APIs, storage patterns, test coverage, and deployment workflows.
• Define and run evaluations for quality, safety, latency, and cost; use findings to improve systems.
• Instrument services with logging, tracing, metrics, alerting, and production runbooks.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and platform teams on requirements, security, and lifecycle ownership.