Applied AI Engineer
Applied AI Engineer at Contrario — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Contrario
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 140000–220000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Contrario is the AI Recruiting Platform powered by expert recruiters. Trusted by teams at every stage for their critical hires. The platform helps companies at every stage hire faster by combining expert recruiters with AI agents that take on the operational work.
We work with 250+ venture-backed companies including Wispr Flow, Listen Labs, and Slash, and a network of 500+ boutique recruiting agencies and recruiters (many formerly at Stripe, Ramp, and Palantir).
In under 6 months, the company has reached $6M in annualized revenue and paid out over $1M to recruiters. We’ve raised $2.3M from Y Combinator, Nexus VP, and angels from Hudson River Trading, Stanford, DoorDash, and OpenAI.
We are scaling aggressively and aiming for:
$20M+ annualized revenue by the end of the year
1,000+ boutique recruiters and 500+ roles on platform
Our team comes from Stanford, Wispr Flow, Giga, BCG, NASA, SAIL, Berkeley, and Northwestern.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are hiring an Applied AI Engineer to help build the core infrastructure powering Contrario’s marketplace.
You will work directly with the founders to design and ship ML matching systems, recruiter routing algorithms, search infrastructure, and AI-powered workflows that determine how talent flows across hundreds of startups.
This is a founding engineering role with extremely high ownership.
You will:
Ship production systems used by hundreds of recruiters and startups
Build the core intelligence layer of the marketplace
Define the technical architecture and engineering culture
Work directly with the founders on product and technical decisions
The systems you build will determine who gets hired at some of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Build ML-driven marketplace systems
Develop ranking and retrieval systems that match recruiters, candidates, and roles using embeddings, structured signals, and marketplace data.
Design search and data infrastructure
Build systems that query and rank candidates, recruiters, and roles across large datasets.
Develop AI-native workflows
Ship automation tools that help recruiters source candidates faster and help companies evaluate talent more efficiently.
Ship full-stack product features
Design and implement features across the entire stack — from database schema and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
Own core marketplace infrastructure
Work on systems that power recruiter routing, candidate evaluation pipelines, and marketplace coordination.
Move extremely fast
Launch features quickly, gather feedback from real users, and iterate rapidly.
REQUIREMENTS
Must-Have
Strong full-stack engineering ability
Experience building production systems using TypeScript and modern web frameworks (Next.js / React).
Comfort working with AI systems
Experience integrating or building systems using:
LLM APIs
embeddings
vector search
retrieval pipelines
Backend and data systems knowledge
Experience designing APIs and working with relational databases.
Product-minded engineer
You care about UX and building systems that users actually love.
High ownership mindset
You can take ambiguous problems and turn them into working systems without heavy direction.
Startup velocity
You ship quickly and are comfortable working in fast-moving environments.
Nice-to-Have
Experience building:
Search or recommendation systems
Marketplace products
AI-native developer workflows
Experience with:
Supabase / Postgres
Vercel deployments
LLM-powered product features
TECH STACK
Frontend
Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind
Backend
TypeScript APIs
Database
Supabase (Postgres)
Infrastructure
Vercel
AI / Data
LLMs, embeddings, retrieval pipelines