Staff AI/ML Engineer

The Opportunity

We are seeking a passionate Staff AI/ML Engineer to shape the development of innovative AI-driven solutions. In this role, you will take ownership of key areas, driving the design, implementation, and optimization of AI agents pipelines and models that redefine how developers create and refine code. This includes advancing tools for code generation, code completion, unit test generation, code repair, etc.

Apply your expertise while continuing to grow in the direction that excites you — whether that’s advancing your technical skills, stepping into leadership, or exploring product development and beyond.

This is a unique opportunity to join an early-stage company led by the founder of a unicorn startup, Andrew Filev, and help scale it into a thriving, innovative business. You’ll be a part of the team that ships AI products, shaping the future of software development and unlocking the creative potential of brilliant minds.

Key Responsibilities

AI is an incredibly competitive space, and to stay ahead and drive innovation, we need to move quickly and think smart. That’s why we maintain a short release cycle and constantly push to deliver new features and improve existing ones at a rapid pace. In this role, you'll take ownership of researching the capabilities of current LLMs and LMMs, identifying how they can be applied to our products, and turning those insights into real impact by designing or enhancing AI agent pipelines. You'll also analyze our AI-driven tools to uncover opportunities for improvement and implement them. Your contributions will help shape the future of software development across the industry.

• Design, build, and optimize LLM-powered agents that assist developers in tasks such as code generation, unit test creation, bug fixing, and refactoring.
• Research the capabilities and limitations of SOTA LLMs and apply findings to improve agent performance and reliability.
• Develop evaluation pipelines to benchmark model quality, correctness, and impact on developer productivity.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, software, and infrastructure teams to integrate AI agents seamlessly into IDE environments (JetBrains, VSCode).
• Craft effective prompts, fine-tune models, and experiment with advanced techniques like RLHF or DPO to guide model behavior.
• Analyze user interactions and data to derive insights and continuously optimize the agent experience.

Essential Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in ML/AI, including shipping models to production and iterative improvement post-launch.
• Strong knowledge of LLMs, including SOTA models (GPT, Claude, Mistral, etc.), with practical experience in prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or retrieval-augmented generation.
• Deep understanding of NLP, including tokenization, embeddings, and transformer architectures.
• Deep understanding of machine learning, including experience with some fields of classical ML (recommendation systems, regressions/classifications on tabular data, and time series or other areas of classical ML).
• Ability to work with customer data to identify usage patterns, perform analytics, and generate insights for product development and model optimization.
• Ability to set up data collection pipelines.
• Solid understanding of software engineering concepts, especially around the SDLC in modern dev environments.
• Proficient in Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, etc.).
• Proven ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment, with excellent communication skills and a commitment to delivering high-quality solutions on time.
• Experience designing and evaluating AI agents or multi-agent pipelines is a strong plus.

Why Join Zencoder?

• Impact: Gen AI will change how companies develop software in the next two years. Be at the frontier of that AI work, building a category-leading product in a huge market. You will have an everyday opportunity to innovate.
• Growth potential: Thrive in a high-growth AI startup combining personal and career growth.
• High Talent Density: Collaborate daily with our experienced AI engineers, software engineers, and founder, Andrew Filev.
• Equity: Align your success with ours by participating in our equity plan.
• Flexibility: We hire globally, prioritizing talent over location. Work where you’re most productive and comfortable.