AI Engineer
At a glance
Mid-level AI Engineering role at Baseten. San Francisco · full-time · $220,000–$260,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build chat and assistant product features, taking them from early prototypes through general availability
- Create the execution paths, harnesses, and safeguards that help AI systems behave reliably in production
- Develop internal AI tools and automation that speed up engineering, research, and go-to-market work
- Work with research engineers to turn proven internal workflows into features customers can use
- Set up evaluations, implement changes across the stack, and address bugs and customer problems promptly
What you bring
- At least five years building and releasing software applications
- A track record of shipping AI or LLM products and agents that people rely on
- Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to understand how models and supporting systems work
- Python proficiency plus fluency in another programming language
Who this fits
This hands-on mid-level role suits an engineer who can work independently, move between customer-facing features and internal tools, and communicate technical ideas in business terms. It is based in San Francisco with a hybrid schedule.
From the employer
ABOUT BASETEN
Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products.
THE ROLE
Are you the person on your team who builds the agent everyone else ends up using? We're looking for an AI Engineer to join our Training Product team and do that at Baseten. You'll build AI-driven product features for the customers training and post-training frontier models on our platform, and you'll raise the ceiling on how Baseten itself uses AI internally, turning manual workflows into agentic ones that make every other team faster.
You'll work directly with our research engineers to scope and build products, taking ideas from a research loop that already works internally to something customers can run themselves. This is a hands-on role with real autonomy. You'll pick the problems worth solving, build the harnesses, execution flows, and guardrails that make AI systems reliable, and own the results. If you've been shipping agents and want that to be the job, let's talk.
EXAMPLE INITIATIVES
Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our team:
RESPONSIBILITIES
Build and ship agentic product experiences, including chat-style and assistant-like interfaces, from prototype to GA.
Design the harnesses, execution flows, and guardrails that make AI systems reliable in production.
Build internal automation and AI tooling that measurably increases the velocity of engineering, research, and go-to-market teams.
Partner with research engineers to scope product opportunities out of internal research workflows and turn them into customer-facing features.
Define and instrument evals so you know whether a change actually improved output quality.
Work throughout the stack (API layer, backend, agent orchestration, frontend) to implement features end to end.
Use Baseten's own training and inference products yourself to develop intuition around customer workflows.
Identify where AI can replace manual process across the company and build the thing rather than write the proposal.
Fix bugs and resolve customer issues with urgency.
REQUIREMENTS
5+ years of experience building and shipping software applications.
Demonstrated experience building AI or LLM-powered products, agents, or agentic workflows that real users depend on.
Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to clear a real technical bar, not just prompt well.
Ability to build accurate mental models of how systems work under the hood, including the models and harnesses you're building on.
Proficiency in Python, with fluency in at least one other language.
Comfort working autonomously in a fast-moving environment with limited structure.
Ability to move between customer-facing product work and internal tooling and automation.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to bridge technical depth and business needs.
NICE TO HAVE
Experience as a founding engineer or early employee at a startup.
Experience building evals, agent observability, or tooling for non-deterministic systems.
Familiarity with agent frameworks and harnesses (LangChain, Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, MCP).
Experience with model development methods like supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, synthetic data generation, LoRA, and full fine-tunes.
Frontend fluency.
BENEFITS
Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
(U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
Paid parental leave
Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
(U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.
Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.
At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).