Lead AI Engineer

About the role

As a Lead AI Engineer, you'll lead engineering for one or more AI initiatives at Sierra. You'll architect the stack, prompt engineer LLMs to solve real‑world problems, and work with your teammates to ship great products you're proud of. You'll collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to take ideas from concept to production while helping shape our startup culture.

Key responsibilities

• Work with a startup founder to build the MVP of their idea.
• Build internal AI tools to improve our own workflows.
• Help grow the team by interviewing and hiring new talent.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical level of the team.

Required profile

• Proven experience delivering real‑world products that use large language models.
• Hands‑on expertise in prompt engineering, Retrieval‑Augmented Generation and agentic patterns.
• Ability to design and run evaluations for LLM‑powered applications.
• Growth mindset with a fast learning speed in the AI domain.
• Leadership experience guiding technical direction, mentoring, and owning projects end‑to‑end.
• Strong communication skills in English, both written and verbal.

Required skills

• Python (e.g., FastAPI) or TypeScript.
• Large language model (LLM) development and prompt engineering.
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic patterns.
• Building evaluation pipelines for LLM products.
• Finetuning LLMs (nice to have).
• Use of AI coding assistants such as Cursor or Claude Code.

What we offer

• Fully remote work with flexible hours, focusing on output rather than time online.
• Supportive, inclusive culture that values growth mindset and teamwork.
• Opportunities to shape company culture as an early employee.
• Competitive salary ranging from $60,000 to $100,000 per year.