{"id":783871,"url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-applied-ai-engineer","title":"Applied AI Engineer","company":{"id":38666,"name":"Shifter","domain":"shifter.no","url":"https://alion.io/company/shifter","size_band":"1-10","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"BambooHR","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Trondheim, Norway"],"countries":["NO"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"ONNX","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Vespa","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":true},{"name":"Slack","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-09T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T15:20:47Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":56,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":56},"description":"Does it sound interesting to work on an open source platform managing the data and real-time search and inference for some of the largest companies in the world? Would you thrive on following the fast-moving AI landscape closely and turning it into concrete capabilities - showing how the latest models and retrieval techniques work best on a production-grade AI search platform? If so, we want you to join our team at Vespa.ai as an Applied AI Engineer!\nAbout Vespa.ai:\nVespa.ai is a team of passionate builders. We maintain and develop the Apache 2.0 licensed open-source AI search platform Vespa.\nVespa is a fully featured search engine and vector database. It supports vector search (ANN), lexical search, and structured data search, all in a single query. Integrated machine-learning model inference enables the application of AI to make sense of data in real time. Together with Vespa's proven scalability and high availability, this empowers to create production-ready search applications at any scale and with any combination of features. Our users and customers are #1 in e-commerce, content, and financial services globally, and are powering companies such as Perplexity, Spotify, Yahoo, Wix, and many more.\nIn addition to our open-source platform, Vespa.ai develops and runs Vespa Cloud, a robust SaaS offering that allows businesses to harness the power of our technology with ease.\nAt Vespa.ai, we are extremely focused on automating everything we do to grow fast and maintain high quality. In all roles, we scale through technology, not simply by adding larger teams. We take pride in being small, nimble, and the most productive.\nPosition overview\nVespa is used to build AI-driven applications at scale: semantic and hybrid search, retrieval-augmented generation, recommendation, and agentic retrieval. The models, techniques and frameworks in this space change monthly, and our platform needs to stay ahead of what users want to build with it.\nWe are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to be our expert on that landscape. This is not a research or model-training role. You will evaluate new models and techniques, integrate the relevant ones with Vespa, build reference applications and demonstrations, and drive improvements to the platform that make it a better foundation for AI applications. You will work primarily with the Vespa engineering team, and with customers and users where it helps you understand what people are actually trying to build.\nAt our Trondheim office, we work office-first: you will be based on-site most of the time, with the flexibility to work from home/remotely when needed, as agreed with your manager.\nResponsibilities\nTrack developments in embedding models, rerankers, LLMs, retrieval techniques and AI frameworks, and assess their relevance for Vespa and its users.\nDesign and build integrations between Vespa and current models and frameworks (ONNX, Hugging Face, LLM APIs, agent frameworks).\nBuild and maintain reference applications, benchmarks and demonstrations showing how to solve AI-driven problems with Vespa.\nPropose and prototype improvements to Vespa that make it more capable for AI workloads.\nWork with users and customers to understand how they combine Vespa and AI, and advise on effective approaches.\nContribute technical content - sample apps, blog posts, documentation - based on this work.\nQualifications\n3+ years of professional software development experience.\nStrong programming skills in Python and Java, or one of them with willingness to work in the other.\nSolid practical understanding of modern AI/ML: embeddings, transformer models, LLMs, retrieval and ranking, and how to evaluate them.\nExperience running ML inference in production systems.\nAbility to explain technical concepts clearly to engineers and technical decision-makers.\nGood understanding of sound software engineering principles and practices.\nExcellent problem-solving and analytical skills.\nAbility to work independently and as part of a team.\nFluent written and spoken English. Norwegian is not required.\nDesired Skills\nHands-on experience with RAG, hybrid search or recommendation systems.\nFamiliarity with ONNX, Hugging Face, LangChain/LlamaIndex or similar.\nExperience with search engines or vector databases.\nContributions to open-source projects or public technical writing.\nSome of Our Tools and Services\nVespa and Vespa Cloud\nPython, Java\nONNX, Hugging Face, PyTorch\nGitHub, Grafana, Slack\nWhy Join Us:\nOpportunities for professional growth and development as part of one of Europe's most exciting start-ups!\nBe part of a cutting-edge team working on innovative search and recommendation technology.\nWork on a team where we don't believe in silos between engineers; there aren't \"developers\", \"ops people\", and \"sysadmins\". We're all engineers solving problems the smart way together!\nCompetitive salary and benefits.\nRelocating to Norway? We'll help you settle in, and offer voluntary Norwegian language training.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4964,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Norwegian","level":"All levels","optional":false},{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT News & Tech Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T01:13:16Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.563,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":56,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-applied-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/shifter-applied-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T15:34:09Z","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":23816,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"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":38666},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=38666"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fshifter-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%2Fshifter-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%2Fshifter-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/shifter-applied-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fshifter-applied-ai-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":783871}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"shifter.no","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":783871},"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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