Applied AI Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 12, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 11, 2026.
Our client is an AI-native product company built to replace how billions of people manage their digital lives - starting with email, notes, and task tools that were never designed to be AI-native. It's backed by multi-million-dollar investment and built remote-first from day one, with a clear target: cut the time it takes users to get everyday things done by roughly 90%. That means solving the problems most AI products avoid - long-running workflows, persistent context, and reliable behavior under real-world, non-deterministic conditions. The team is small and high-talent-density by design, not by necessity, and moves at a pace that matches the scale of what it's building.
About the Role
You'll own the research and intelligence direction of this system - defining how the AI reasons, evaluates, and improves in a product used with high frequency.
What You'll Do
- Set and evolve the research direction for the company's core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration
- Decide when to design new model architectures versus adapting or leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models
- Define evaluation frameworks that measure real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior - not benchmark vanity
- Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns
- Guide exploration of frontier techniques: retrieval-augmented training, mixture-of-experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, multimodal systems
- Shape early product intelligence direction in close partnership with product and application engineering
- Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization
Requirements
- Deep experience building or evolving real machine learning systems used in production
- Strong technical judgment around model behavior, failure modes, and long-horizon trade-offs
- A builder's mindset - you care about systems that work in the real world, not just ideas
- Comfortable making irreversible or high-impact decisions with incomplete information
- An obsession with evaluation, correctness, and how systems behave over time
- High ownership mentality - you operate as a founder, not a manager
Location
Remote, open to candidates in Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Indonesia, Seoul, or Singapore.
This probably isn't a fit if your focus is primarily publishing, incremental benchmarks, or managing a large research organization - this role is not that.
Tech Stack
Python · PyTorch / JAX · GPU-based training and inference systems
What to Expect
The best products in the world are built by small, world-class teams. Decisions are made collectively, at rapid speed - balancing high-quality shipping with fast learning. You'll be expected to bring structure, exercise judgment, and execute independently.
Compensation and benefits are competitive and vary by location; the package includes base salary and equity, discussed openly with you as part of the process.
If there's a fit, expect 3-4 interviews total, followed by a prompt, transparent decision. To be considered, please make sure to answer the screening questions in the application form - we're not able to review submissions that skip them.