Senior AI/ML Engineer

Location
San Francisco
Workplace
On-site
Employment
Full-time
Compensation
$180k – $275k + equity
Visa
Visa Sponsorship Available

About this role

We're looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to build the AI systems layer behind Drawbridge's process intelligence platform.

This is a full-time role for a senior applied AI engineer who cares about making AI behavior measurable, reliable, safe, and useful in production. We build production AI systems on top of hosted frontier models from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.

You will own the systems that turn messy enterprise data into structured process intelligence: retrieval, context construction, model/provider selection, structured extraction, evals, orchestration, quality loops, and monitoring.

What we're looking for

Must-haves

  • 4-6+ years building production software, ML systems, or applied AI systems
  • Production AI engineering: You have strong skills and experience building reliable, observable AI services and pipelines, including handling latency, cost, retries, failures, and debugging in production
  • Practical LLM experience: You have hands-on experience turning hosted LLM APIs into product behavior through structured outputs, retrieval and context construction, tool use, or multi-step workflows.
  • AI quality ownership: You can define what good means, build representative datasets and evaluations, diagnose failures in data or model behavior, and ship regression tests, guardrails, and fallback paths.
  • AI evaluation and guardrails: Experience with golden datasets, LLM-as-judge, human review, regression testing, launch gates, hallucination reduction, constraint enforcement, verification, and fallback paths.
  • Systems thinking: You can reason about pipelines end-to-end, from raw customer data to generated outputs and user-facing product behavior
  • Pragmatic mindset: You know when to refactor vs. ship, when to build vs. buy, and how to manage technical debt intentionally
  • Ownership mentality: You take end-to-end responsibility for features, from design through deployment and monitoring
  • Comfort with ambiguity: You can turn a fuzzy product goal into experiments, implementation, measurement, and shipped improvements

Strongly preferred

  • Customer-facing communication: Clear written and verbal communicator with users/customers
  • Retrieval and knowledge systems: Hands-on experience with embeddings, hybrid search, chunking, ranking, reranking, and assembling useful context from messy knowledge sources.
  • Agentic workflows: Experience making multi-step, tool-using AI systems reliable when plans, tools, or intermediate outputs can fail.
  • Document understanding: Experience extracting structured, trustworthy information from long or messy enterprise documents.
  • AI-assisted development: You already use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, or similar to accelerate your work

Nice to have

  • Process mining, task mining, or enterprise workflow experience
  • Multimodal inputs: Experience with documents, screenshots, video, transcripts, or mixed enterprise data sources
  • Go or backend service experience

Our tech stack

Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, React 19 + TypeScript, GCP, Terraform, Docker, Datadog, GitHub

AI stack

Hosted LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), embeddings and retrieval, structured extraction, agent/tool-calling workflows, eval pipelines, and AI observability

What happens next

Skip the application pile. Clera gets you in front of the people who decide.

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

Clera pitches you to the company

Clera writes the intro, sends it to the founder, and handles the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, Clera gets the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Culture & values

5-days-in-office culture in San Francisco

High ownership with architectural decision-making authority

Direct founder collaboration

Customer obsession with engineers expected to jump on calls with customers

AI-native development using AI-assisted tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex

Team values curiosity, pragmatism, and builder mentality

Young, clean codebase where early engineers set architectural patterns

High velocity operating style

Direct technical decision-making authority for early engineering contributors

Iterative development based on direct customer feedback

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Tell me about the Senior AI/ML Engineer role at Drawbridge on Clera (https://www.getclera.com/jobs/drawbridge/senior-ai-ml-engineer--hhjodncon4an). Does it fit my profile and preferences? If it does, tell Clera I'm interested.
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