Applied AI Engineer
About
About Pointer
Pointer builds AI systems that model, execute, and verify complex operational work across a company’s existing software. We start in finance operations, where black boxes are not an option and every autonomous action needs to be provable. We recently raised our seed round from incredible investors and are looking for gritty, fast-learning engineers to join us.
About the role
You'll understand how Pointer thinks: the intelligence that powers the automation. You'll work on everything from browser agent reliability to document understanding to inference optimization, building systems that make Pointer more accurate and faster every week. This is a role for someone who thrives on turning research into production, working on problems like pushing Pointer to state-of-the-art across core automation capabilities (UI interaction, unstructured data parsing, tool use), building adaptive systems that self-heal when environments change, designing fine-tuning pipelines that learn from customer-specific workflows, and optimizing latency across the stack through model selection, quantization, caching, and routing strategies
Requirements
Must-have
- Strong Python and ML frameworks, particularly PyTorch.
- Eval-and-metric mindset. You think in terms of metrics that matter in production, not just benchmarks.
- Comfort with messy data and figuring out how to make it useful.
- Track record of shipping. You can describe specific systems you've built end-to-end.
- Crisp communication about your own work. You can describe what you built in a few clear sentences without buzzwords.
- Based in San Francisco or willing to relocate, in-person 5 days a week.
Nice-to-have
- Experience with RL, retrieval systems, or agent-based systems
- Cross-stack range: inference optimization, data pipelines, fine-tuning, and model monitoring
- Published ML papers or significant OSS contributions
- Lab or research exposure (SAIL, BAIR, MIT CSAIL, similar)
- Recent applied work on LLMs, browser agents, RAG, or production AI workflows
Benefits & perks
- Coffee, lunch, dinner, and snacks covered
- M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pro, 2+ monitors, and more
- Unlimited PTO
- 401(k)
Interview process
- 1Application review
- 2Initial conversation
- 3Technical deep dive
- 4Take-home assessment
- 5On-site work trial
- 6Offer Extended
- 7Hired
Drop your CV for this role.
One PDF and your email. We read it, score your fit for this role at Pointer, and route the introduction through us.