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About This Role
Founding AI/ML Engineer — Guthrie AI
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Location: Philadelphia, PA · New York City, NY · Washington, DC corridor (Remote\-first with Philadelphia hub)
Compensation: $175,000 – $240,000 base \+ meaningful early\-employee equity
Visa Sponsorship: H\-1B, F\-1, OPT, and STEM OPT supported
Experience Level: 6\+ years
Employment Type: Full\-Time
### About Guthrie AI
Guthrie AI is building the AI\-powered workflow layer for one of the world's largest industries: construction. Headquartered in Philadelphia with a remote\-first team and a newly opened Philly hub office, the company has approximately $2M ARR on its core product and recently closed a seed round — with plans to grow revenue 10x over the next 12 months. Construction has resisted meaningful software innovation for more than 15 years, particularly among subcontractors. Guthrie believes agents and multimodal AI are the first technologies capable of fundamentally transforming how construction teams operate.
### About the Role
Guthrie is hiring a Founding AI/ML Engineer to architect and ship production\-grade AI systems that solve real customer problems. This is not a research role or a demo\-focused position. The company is looking for product\-minded engineers who can build reliable AI workflows used daily by customers. The role reports directly to the Chief AI Officer and works closely with founders and customers.
### What You'll Own
- Build and ship production\-grade AI systems used by real customers
- Design multimodal pipelines for drawings, specifications, and construction documents
- Build agentic workflows that automate document intake, extraction, takeoff support, bid preparation, and QA
- Build and improve retrieval systems, evaluation systems, and orchestration layers
- Improve model quality, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency
- Prototype and iterate on customer\-facing AI features
- Own systems end to end from experimentation through deployment
- Help shape engineering culture and technical direction
### Requirements
- 6\+ years of engineering experience including experience at an early\-stage startup
- Production AI/ML systems deployed to real customers
- Hands\-on experience with LLMs, computer vision, segmentation models, or applied ML systems
- Retrieval experience — embeddings, reranking, chunking, knowledge bases, and source\-grounded answers
- Agentic workflow experience — tools, APIs, state management, retries, guardrails, and observability
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals — APIs, async processing, queues, databases, cloud deployment, and monitoring
- End\-to\-end ownership from problem definition through deployment
### Nice to Have
- Construction, AEC, glazing, curtain wall, or architectural metals experience
- Multimodal AI, OCR, document intelligence, or computer vision background
- Experience converting human\-operated workflows into products
- Inference optimization or evaluation systems experience
### This Role Is NOT For
- Research\-focused candidates without production deployment experience
- Demo\-only builders without customer\-facing systems
- Engineers who over\-rely on AI tools without strong architectural judgment
- Consumer\-only or developer\-tool backgrounds without enterprise software experience
### Benefits
- Employer\-funded health insurance through Patch
- Team stipend and meal stipend
- Meaningful early\-employee equity grant
### Interview Process
- Initial screen (30\-minute hiring manager interview)
- Getting\-to\-know\-you round with product leadership, co\-founders, and CEO
- \~2\-hour technical / architecture round
- Optional on\-site visit to Philadelphia office
- Offer
### Logistics
- Remote\-first — Philadelphia / New York / Washington DC corridor preferred
- Philadelphia hub office available
- H\-1B, F\-1, OPT, and STEM OPT visa sponsorship available
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph \& Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Guthrie AI.
Salary Context
This $175K-$240K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At David Joseph & Company, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $160,000. This role's midpoint ($207K) sits 16% above the category median. Disclosed range: $175K to $240K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.
David Joseph & Company AI Hiring
David Joseph & Company has 18 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Product Manager, AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, AI Agent Developer. Positions span Philadelphia, PA, US, San Mateo, CA, US, Austin, TX, US. Compensation range: $165K - $350K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 16% (613 positions) offer remote work, while 3,187 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,448 roles, $210,000 median); San Francisco (1,990 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,686 roles, $189,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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