LLM/AI Engineer

Everyone is unique, and everyone learns differently. The power and promise of artificial intelligence in education is being able to help every student learn in their own unique way, while moving social cohorts ahead together and fostering insightful, high-value teacher-student interactions. We are creating a uniquely equitable, accessible, and motivating user experience for learners of all ages. To pull this off, the team we’re building requires a unique blend of curiosity, raw ability, ambition, empathy, and a relentless desire to learn.

Incubated at Stanford with people at the center of generative AI, large language models, education, human-centered design, and experience-first product development, Atypical AI is a seed-stage startup run by group of talented humans from across industry, science, business, and academia, who are driven by their relentless desire to learn and to make education more equitable.

Job Description

We are seeking a highly experienced engineer to join our small, super talented, and fast-paced team and lead the design, engineering, and deployment of our large language model and broader AI capabilities, all in support of delivering engaging, human-centric user experiences. In this role you will work closely with the company founders and leaders, and will have significant influence on Atypical’s product roadmap and technology architecture. You will be building the foundational platforms and capabilities that will form the core of everything we do at Atypical.

The ideal candidate has been building products generative AI and large language model applications, and has experience building products using them. You should have keen instincts on the technology ecosystem surrounding generative AI, and keep up to date on emerging trends. You should have a practiced hand with prompt engineering. Making educated decisions about when to fine-tune, when to use specific models, and when to fall back to traditional ML or even good ol’ code will be important in this role. You should have a deep full stack background and be versed in modern frontend and backend web technologies, with an emphasis on Python, TypeScript, and Node.js. You should have experience building consumer-facing and/or enterprise digital products, as well as the API services that power them, along with experience collaborating closely with product managers, designers, and data engineers. You should know the mechanics and constraints of integrating with data/ML/analytics pipelines. You should enjoy teaching what you learn, and helping your fellow engineers get excited about new technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of our generative AI capabilities, with a focus on enabling the friendly, engaging, human-centered experiences that use them.
• Combine prompt engineering, model selection, hyperparameter configuration, model fine-tuning, data retrieval, and code to enable key product features.
• Develop and maintain services that leverage our large language model capabilities, with a heavy emphasis on Python and TypeScript.
• Work alongside a talented team of entrepreneurs, engineers, subject matter experts, and external stakeholders to deeply understand requirements, design architectures to fit current and future needs, communicate scope and tradeoffs, and implement features.
• Mentor other engineers and product teams on best practices in generative AI technology.
• Integrate your systems with our data pipelines, APIs and web services, and our other product capabilities.
• Build clean, maintainable, efficient, and well-documented products and supporting architectures, with continuous testing and monitoring capabilities at their core.
• Consulting on team hiring and other resource needs and mentoring more junior engineers.
• Collaborate with the team to troubleshoot, debug and fix issues in production systems.
• Perform code reviews, identify key testable areas of the stack, and ensure adherence to good engineering practices.

Qualifications

• Diverse experience prompting and building experiences using GPT and other LLMs, and building product experiences on top of them.
• Experience with LLM tooling and frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, Langfuse, etc.
• 5+ years of experience as a senior-level product engineer and/or architect.
• Strong experience prototyping, hacking, and integrating across all parts of the stack.
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript, and React, with  a love for building vertically within the stack.
• Familiarity with broader machine learning concepts and where they are applicable
• A desire to immerse yourself and engage with customers and users to deeply understand their problems and context, and to incorporate their feedback into the design process.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with a focus on efficient and performant solutions.
• Well-practiced experience with end-to-end testing, unit testing, and production monitoring of your code.
• Experience in early-stage startups (or similarly-structured teams) where you’ve had to wear multiple hats and collaborate closely with multiple teams & disciplines.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with an ability to create clarity from ambiguity.
• Able to work independently with minimal supervision.

Why Join Atypical?

At Atypical, you will have the opportunity to learn every detail about this brave new AI-powered world, and to work on exciting, complex, and deeply meaningful problems, shaping the future of education for decades to come. We offer competitive compensation, unlimited PTO and a flexible work schedule, a learning & development stipend, and more. Join us and be part of a team that values innovation, creativity, and inclusivity.