{"id":1268645,"url":"https://alion.io/job/littlebird-applied-ai-engineer-agent-intelligence-retrieval","title":"Applied AI Engineer - Agent Intelligence & Retrieval","company":{"id":2106924,"name":"Littlebird","domain":"littlebird.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/littlebird-ai","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Gem","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":136000,"max_usd":294000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":2391},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Windows","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-11-20T18:37:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-13","last_verified_at":"2026-09-26T05:56:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":311,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":310},"description":"Role Overview\nWe're seeking an Applied AI Engineer to join our fast-paced team to design, develop, and implement new features for Littlebird, our AI teammate for Mac and Android (Windows soon). We're building a personal AI that connects your entire digital life, protecting your focus from clutter and surfacing what you need, the moment you need it. Check out the recent TechCrunch news on our $11M seed funding and what users are saying about the product.\nWe're a small, async-first team that values craft and ownership. Our engineers live at the intersection of genuine research curiosity and production discipline: you'll push the frontier in areas like conversational inference, ranking, and sentiment analysis, then wrestle those ideas into systems that are fast, lean, and built to scale.\nThe Role\nThis role is about making our agent smarter, faster, and more reliable. You will live in the core of our AI, obsessing over the quality of our retrieval, the precision of our ranking, and the logic of our agent.\nSome of the hard problems you'll solve:\nMaster the Art of Retrieval & Re-ranking: Our current hybrid search pipeline is functional but will need to scale with customer growth. You will own its evolution.\nSolve the \"Broad Query\" Problem: How do you make retrieval work just as well for \"what did I do last week?\" as it does for a specific, targeted question? This involves query analysis, decomposition, and potentially multiple retrieval strategies.\nOptimize the Ranking Stack: You'll experiment with and productionize new re-ranking models to crush our latency bottlenecks. You'll fine-tune our ranking strategy to better blend sparse and dense retrieval signals.\nDevelop Intelligent Pruning: How do you shrink the context passed to the LLM by 80% without losing the critical 1% of information that leads to the right answer? You'll design and test sophisticated context pruning and summarization techniques.\n\nEngineer Better Agentic Reasoning: Our agent uses a multi-step, tool-calling approach to solve problems. Debugging and improving it is a core challenge.\nContext Engineering: You'll become an expert in \"prompt-level\" performance, figuring out the optimal way to structure and present context to the LLM to minimize hallucinations and improve reasoning.\nDebugging Complex Agentic Flows: You'll be a detective, tracing the root cause of agent failures through layers of tool calls, context retrieval, and LLM responses to understand where things went wrong and how to fix them.\n\nWhat we're looking for:\nStrong OOP programming skills and prior experience writing production software in python, Typescript, or C++\nA deep, intuitive understanding of information retrieval and modern RAG pipelines. You've likely built a few from scratch.\nHands-on experience with vector databases, hybrid search, and re-ranking models.\nAn experimental, data-driven mindset. You're comfortable running A/B tests, analyzing metrics, and iterating quickly to improve performance.\nA pragmatic approach. You're focused on shipping tangible improvements to the AI's quality, not just chasing SOTA benchmarks.\nBenefits\nRemote-friendly work environment\nCollaborative team culture\nOpportunity to shape infrastructure decisions\nCompetitive compensation packages including stock and health benefits, paid time off, and parental leave. 401k options for all US-based employees.\nFlexible working hours across multiple time zones\nWe love to hear when birds chirp!","description_format":"text","description_chars":3453,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Flexible schedule","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Cybersecurity","AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T23:09:55Z"}],"liveness":{"score":3,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.115,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":310,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:23","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/littlebird-applied-ai-engineer-agent-intelligence-retrieval","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/littlebird-applied-ai-engineer-agent-intelligence-retrieval.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T03:20:07Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2079,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2921,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}