Applied AI Engineer (AI-Native Marketplace) - Worthland - New York, NY

Applied AI Engineer (AI-Native Marketplace)
Location: New York City (on-site, relocation supported)
Compensation: USD 170,000 – 230,000 + Equity
Hiring: Up to 2 engineers
Company: Confidential (represented by Worthland)

About the Project
Our client is a well-funded, AI-native startup building a real production marketplace in a space that has historically relied on manual workflows and human judgment.

The company has achieved clear product–market fit , is growing rapidly with a lean team, and uses AI not as an add-on but as the core decision engine of the business. Their systems directly impact matching quality, speed, and operational efficiency at scale.

This is a hands-on role for builders who want to ship AI systems that operate in messy, real-world conditions and materially move business metrics.

The Role
As an Applied AI Engineer, you will own end-to-end AI systems powering the marketplace: scoring, matching, ranking, recommendations, and internal automation.

You will work directly with the founder and operations team. There is no separate ML platform team— you own the full loop , from problem definition through production iteration.

This is not a research role and not an infra-only ML position. It is a product-focused, applied AI builder role .

Role Split (Approximate)

~60% Applied AI / ML: model selection, prompting, fine-tuning, evaluation, experimentation

~40% Product & Engineering: backend services, APIs, data pipelines, product integration

First 30 Days (What Success Looks Like)
Week 1

Develop a deep understanding of existing AI systems (scoring, matching, automation)

Identify where models perform well vs. where they fail in production

Partner with the ops team to understand manual overrides and edge cases

Align with the founder on the highest-leverage problems to solve first

Weeks 2–4

Ship meaningful improvements to scoring/matching models and related