Applied AI Engineer

We are seeking an experienced Applied AI Engineer to join our team and contribute to the continued success of Blend. As an Applied AI Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining our agentic solutions. You will work closely with our product development team to understand and translate customer needs into functional and scalable software solutions.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand and translate business requirements into technical specifications & code.
• Architect, design, and lead the implementation of complex AI/ML solutions, with a strong focus on leveraging and orchestrating large foundational models (e.g., GPT, Llama, Gemini, Claude, Stable Diffusion) and pre-trained AI services from cloud providers or open-source libraries.
• Take a leading role in designing, implementing, and deploying sophisticated AI agents and multi-agent systems using frameworks like DSPy, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or similar, to automate complex tasks, enable advanced reasoning, and drive new product capabilities.
• Define and build robust, scalable APIs and services that expose advanced AI functionalities, including those powered by foundational models and agentic systems, serving as core components for other engineering teams and product features.
• Develop, evangelize, and refine advanced prompt engineering strategies and techniques to maximize the performance, safety, and desired outputs from foundational models across diverse applications.
• Design and optimize robust data pipelines for efficient AI model consumption, with a particular emphasis on architecting and implementing highly performant and scalable Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns for foundational models.
• Develop a rigorous eval framework to assess model performance and track model drift, data quality issues, and performance degradation.
• Identify and troubleshoot defects and issues, ensuring timely resolution.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation
• Participate in code reviews to maintain code quality and ensure best practices.
• Encourage great habits to enhance team practices by participating in code reviews & offering peer mentorship and guidance.
• Create your own story! Some of Blend’s best features have come from engineering initiatives. You’ll have an opportunity to propose new ideas and build features end-to-end.

• 5+ years of progressive professional experience as an Applied AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, or a similar role, with a proven track record of architecting and deploying complex AI solutions in production, particularly involving large language models, other foundational models, and agentic systems.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or a related quantitative field.
• Expert proficiency in Python and extensive experience with relevant libraries for data processing, API development, and advanced interaction with foundational models (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers, OpenAI API, Anthropic API, Google AI SDKs).
• Deep understanding and hands-on experience with the practical application, fine-tuning, and deployment of large foundational models in real-world scenarios.
• Expert-level experience with designing and implementing sophisticated AI agents and multi-agent systems using at least one major agentic framework (e.g., DSPy, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen).
• Extensive experience with at least one major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) for deploying, managing, and optimizing large-scale AI services. Deep understanding of cloud AI services is essential.
• You are an excellent communicator and can operate independently & collaboratively in a fast-paced environment, driving projects to a successful outcome.
• Ability and willingness to help others succeed and be productive.