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About This Role
About the Role
We are hiring a Applied AI Engineer for a leading fintech company's AI Team to serve as the team's technical anchor in the United States.
You will lead two primary streams:
- AI Coding tooling and developer experience — bringing the engineering depth of Silicon Valley front-line teams (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Replit Agent, etc.) into ByLabs.
- AI application paradigm exploration and dogfooding — building small, frontier prototypes in internal scenarios that validate streaming UX, transparent agent steps, long-context memory, and other emerging patterns, and propagating them across the team through reference code, blog posts, and workshops.
This role is about craft and taste. You are not a platform architect, nor a BU project delivery engineer. You are the person who turns front-line Silicon Valley product engineering experience into multiplicative leverage for the entire AI Team.
Responsibilities
- Introduce AI Coding tooling best practices — Bring the engineering depth of Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Replit Agent, and similar tools (Skills, hooks, subagents, long-context engineering, MCP integration) into ByLabs. Produce engineer onboarding playbooks and advanced-usage standards.
- Set the bar for the Skill Marketplace — Define Skill design conventions; personally deliver 5–10 reference-quality Skills as exemplars; raise team-wide Skill engineering quality through PR review.
- Prototype an AI-native engineering workflow — Reimagine the spec design implementation review testing release operations lifecycle around AI tools, producing a reference workflow APAC teams can adopt.
- Build internal AI application prototypes (employee-facing scenarios) — In OpenClaw, A2UI, role-bound AI assistants, and similar internal contexts, build small frontier prototypes that validate streaming UX, transparent agent steps, long-context memory, multi-agent collaboration, and other emerging patterns.
- Provide reference architecture code — When APAC teams face hard architectural choices in new AI scenarios, deliver runnable "this is how Silicon Valley does it" reference implementations — not documents, but working code.
- Cross-team craft propagation — One internal tech talk per month, one in-depth blog per quarter, and one onsite workshop in APAC per half year. Distill Silicon Valley AI application best practices into durable team assets.
- Architecture review participation — As the AI Team's anchor in the U.S., participate in ByLab's AI architecture review process and provide frontier perspective and taste-based feedback at the application layer.
Major Requirements
- Education: Top-tier CS / EE BS or above; MS preferred.
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years focused on LLM applications.
- Senior AI application engineering experience: Has shipped AI applications from 0 1 in production (not demos). Must have at least one tour of duty as a core engineer at a top-tier Silicon Valley AI company or a leading AI product team — examples include Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and similar.
- Deep AI Coding tooling fluency: Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, or Replit Agent (at least one) is a daily-driver in your workflow, and you can articulate its engineering implementation. Strong understanding of the engineering tradeoffs in Skills, hooks, subagents, MCP, and long-context engineering.
- Agent application engineering depth: Solid grasp of ReAct, Plan-Execute, Reflection, Multi-Agent, and Orchestrator-Worker tradeoffs. Hands-on experience with LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenAI Swarm, or in-house frameworks.
- Strong full-stack engineering: Strong backend (Go / Python / TypeScript). Mid-level or above frontend (React / Next.js). Comfortable with end-to-end streaming rendering and interaction.
- Strong product sense and craft: Comfortable collaborating with PMs and designers; you have considered opinions and taste on AI application UX patterns (streaming, undo, context surfacing, agent-step progress, etc.).
- Public technical influence: A track record of public output — blog, talks, OSS contributions — sufficient to represent the team's craft externally.
- Self-direction and async collaboration: Capable of independently judging value priorities and driving prototype-to-dogfooding loops; effective at collaborating with APAC counterparts via documents, PRs, and asynchronous communication.
Nice to have
- Open-source contributions to LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, Claude Code MCP, OpenTelemetry GenAI, or similar projects.
- Track record of translating research output (papers, blog posts) into production application patterns.
- SaaS B2B product 0 1 experience.
- Experience productizing multilingual (English / Chinese) applications.
- AI experience in the financial or crypto domain.
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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Embedding VC, 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 $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Embedding VC AI Hiring
Embedding VC has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Francisco, CA, US.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $261,000 across 2,646 tracked positions. That's 23% above the national 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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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