{"id":3297024,"url":"https://alion.io/job/different-applied-ai-engineer","title":"Applied AI Engineer","company":{"id":3050,"name":"Different","domain":"different.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/different","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":145000,"max":285000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":285000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T05:53:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T20:56:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":42,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":42},"description":"About us\nDifferent is a marketing system that runs demand generation for B2B companies. It handles campaign creation, personalization, and optimization in one place, so lean teams can do more without adding headcount, agencies or point AI solutions. Customers use Different to launch campaigns faster, reach the right buyers, and continuously improve marketing ROI. Between them, Different’s founders have founded two unicorns, led AI at a global marketing software giant, and built platforms used by millions. They bring deep product, technical, and business experience to one shared goal: reimagining how modern marketing works. We are backed by General Catalyst and Lightspeed.\nThe role\nYou'll build the agents, evals, and model systems behind Different.\nThis is not a foundation model research role. The job is to take fast-moving models and make them useful in a real product. These systems need to be reliable enough to act on a marketer's behalf and practical enough to run in production.Many of these problems don't have established solutions yet. You'll read new research, test ideas, build evals, and ship the approaches that hold up.\nWhat you'll work on\nAgents and tool use: build multi-step workflows that turn a marketer's goal into concrete actions.\nGeneration: improve the quality of ads, emails, landing pages, and other marketing content produced by the system.\nEvals: define what good looks like, measure it, and use the results to improve the system.\nContext and memory: decide what a model needs to know at each step, what should be remembered, and what should be retrieved on demand.\nLearning from outcomes: use marketer edits, feedback, and campaign results to improve future decisions.\nExploration: decide when the system should try something new and when it should stick with what is working.\nModel systems: choose, route, and, where useful, fine-tune models while balancing quality, latency, and cost.\nWhat we're looking for\nStrong ML fundamentals and experience building with modern LLMs beyond a prototype.\nSolid software engineering skills. Production reliability matters more here than a clever demo.\nComfort taking an idea from a paper to an experiment to production code.\nGood judgment about which new techniques are worth the effort.\nRelevant experience may include:\nAgents, tool use, or long-horizon reasoning.\nLLM evals and LLM-as-judge systems.\nGenerative content systems.\nRAG, context engineering, or memory.\nFine-tuning, post-training, or distillation.\nContextual bandits, reinforcement learning, or online learning.\nRecommendation or explore/exploit systems.\nModel routing and inference optimization.\nA background in computer science, machine learning, statistics, or a related quantitative field helps. An MS or PhD is useful but not required. You don't need any marketing or advertising experience.\nWhy this is interesting\nMost LLM applications end when the model returns an answer. Different keeps going: the system needs to decide what to do, take action, see what happened, and use that result the next time it makes a decision.\nIn this role, you can test ideas against real marketing outcomes. The hard part is building a system that keeps working as the models, tools, and inputs change.\nAnnual compensation range:\n$145k-$285k\nActual compensation will depend on the candidate's experience, skills and the scope of the role. In addition to base salary, Different offers equity and benefits.\nLogistics\nSan Francisco Bay Area\nFull-time\n5 days/week in office","description_format":"text","description_chars":3499,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marketing Automation","Marketing & Sales AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-26T22:14:01Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":28,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.613,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":42,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:2","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":285000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/different-applied-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/different-applied-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-07T01:13:44Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3029,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-08T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3050},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3050"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdifferent-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdifferent-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdifferent-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/different-applied-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdifferent-applied-ai-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3297024}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"different.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3297024},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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