Product Engineer (AI Driven)

AE Studio is a development, data science, and design studio that works closely with founders and executives to create custom software and machine learning solutions.

We build products, platforms, and internal ventures that increase agency for all conscious beings. We combine world-class software engineering, AI expertise, and product design to ship ambitious projects that matter.

We’re looking for a Full-Stack Developer who bridges modern web engineering with practical AI; someone who can design, build, and ship production-ready, AI-powered applications while maintaining the standards of a top-tier software developer.

What You’ll Do

• Design and ship end-to-end applications from prototype to production across frontend, backend, and cloud.
• Build clean, scalable APIs and services and integrate AI models where they create real value.
• Create AI pipelines (data ingestion, preprocessing, embeddings, retrieval, orchestration) that are reliable and maintainable.
• Engineer prompting strategies and guardrails for real-world performance (latency, cost, accuracy), not just demo hype.
• Integrate AI features into full-stack apps with robust APIs, frontend UX, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaborate with designers, PMs, and engineers to deliver polished product experiences.
• Continuously evaluate new AI tools/models for performance, cost, and fit.
• Write production-grade, testable, maintainable code in TypeScript/JavaScript and Python (and other languages as needed).

What We’re Looking For

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven track record shipping production applications (links to live products welcome).
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic), embeddings, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong command of modern web stacks (e.g., React/Next.js, Node.js/Nest/Fastify, Python/FastAPI) and cloud infrastructure.
• Solid grasp of architecture, scalability, performance, and security.
• A bias toward shipping with best practices (testing, code reviews, monitoring/observability).
• Clear communication, self-management, and comfort in a collaborative remote environment.
• Comfortable picking up new languages and frameworks, leveraging modern AI dev tools to move faster.

What Sets You Apart

• Experience fine-tuning models or training custom models on domain-specific data.
• Contributions to open-source AI or developer tooling.
• Mature approach to prompt engineering and evaluation (beyond trial-and-error).
• Background in data engineering or MLOps.
• Passion for AI alignment, agency-increasing technologies, and ethical AI development.

If you can write prompts that work today and code that still works in two years, we want to talk to you.

Salary range from $115k/year to $185k/year (if you're based in LA). Not in the range? That's fine, you can still apply and our team may fit you in a more senior position that we're not actively hiring for right now, since we are growing fast and may have other openings soon.

EQUITY

Working at AE means receiving equity in our client projects and in Skunkworks ventures. The equity is priced at $0 when granted for tax reasons, but AE invests millions into these projects. Equity comes from reduced margins on client work and internal funding. You get a real stake in the things you help build.

The longer you stay, the more value you create and the more equity you receive. If you leave on good terms, you can retain 20% of your equity by staying engaged. If you spin out a Skunkworks venture, you retain 100%.