Senior AI Engineer - Taste Layer for AI

About this role

You’ll build the AI systems that power taste evals, tooling, APIs, and RL environments, from agent architectures and data pipelines to the product surfaces where users interact with the platform.

The work skews backend (synthetic data, embeddings, crawling, evaluation systems), but you’ll also ship front-end tooling and gamified experiences when needed. This is an early-stage environment with high ownership and lots of building from scratch.

Our Client

Our client is building the taste layer for AI - teaching models what great feels like across subjective domains. Their on a mission to end AI slop and help create a world with more taste. You'll work at the cutting edge of AI research with creative experts, shaping the future of how AI understands subjective quality and aesthetics.

Core focus

• Craft agent harnesses, memory, and self-improvement loops
• Design evaluation pipelines and synthetic data generation systems
• Create embedding and retrieval infrastructure that scales to millions of requests
• Build crawling and scraping systems for visual data across the web
• Set up inference serving and APIs for client-facing products
• Develop tooling and infrastructure that makes everything reliable and fast

Also you

• Ship internal tools for data operations and external tools for expert annotators
• Build gamified product experiences: taste quizzes, leaderboards, reward flows

What matters to us

• Startup DNA: You’ve built at early-stage companies (pre-seed to Series C) and operate well in ambiguity
• Real AI building experience: You’ve shipped agent systems, built with LLMs, and understand the craft — whether through your job, open source, or serious personal projects
• Genuine curiosity about taste: This problem is hard, nuanced, and undefined. You find that energizing, not frustrating
• Creative problem-solving: We’re not optimizing existing systems. We’re inventing infrastructure for something that doesn’t exist yet

Bonus points

• Open source contributions
• Background at creative companies (Figma, Notion, Canva, Adobe, Runway, etc.) or companies with strong indexing/crawling work (e.g. Firecrawl, Brave, Luma, Pika)
• Personal projects that show you build things because you’re curious

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in fullstack or backend software engineering

Compensation & Additional Details

• Salary: $180K – $300K
• Equity: 0.25% – 0.75%
• Visa sponsorship available: O-1, STEM OPT, H-1B (if exempt from $100K fee)
• On-site work policy: In-office in San Francisco
• Full-time position
• Location: San Francisco

Tech stack

Python, React, TypeScript, LLM & Agent frameworks (LangChain, Pydantic AI, LlamaIndex), vector databases, and related AI infrastructure tooling.

From Tangerine Search:

Tangerine Search is an equal opportunity agency that values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.