Software Engineer -- Applied AI (All Level)
Plot, New York City
- Pay
- $120K – $230K • Offers Equity
- Work type
- Onsite
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- ML / AI engineering
- Posted
- Jan 22, 2026
About the role
WHY PLOT
Plot is building the next generation of social intelligence — an AI-native platform that helps some of the world's most influential brands understand culture, find emerging trends, and activate their communities at scale. We're a high-growth, venture-backed startup supported by the co-founders of Reddit and Plaid, with customers like Tory Burch, Lululemon, La Roche-Posay, and other household names.
We operate at the frontier of applied AI and agentic systems, ingesting and reasoning over millions of short-form videos to uncover consumer insights no one else can see. Our work impacts real product decisions, global marketing campaigns, and how brands engage their fans.
You'll join a small experienced team where engineers ship product — not tickets. You'll work hand-in-hand with our product designer from day one, shaping features before specs exist and turning rough ideas into shipped experiences. You'll work directly with founders, hop on customer calls, and own company-defining features end-to-end. If you want real responsibility, fast learning loops, and the ability to shape both product and company, Plot is the place. It's also a perfect fit if you aspire to build your own startup one day — we operate with a deep founder's mindset.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
- Build agentic, reasoning-driven systems on top of cutting-edge LLMs to power consumer intelligence, marketing automation, and influencer activation.
- Collaborate deeply with product design to prototype, iterate, and ship AI features from 0→1. You'll be in Figma reviews, whiteboarding sessions, and user interviews — not just implementing handed-down specs.
- Design & execute LLM/ML evaluation frameworks — from offline benchmarks to live A/B tests — to measure quality, reliability, and business impact.
- Own full-stack AI product features: prompt design, orchestration, tooling, monitoring, and the UX that brings it all together.
- Collaborate closely with founders, design, marketing, and customers to ensure our AI deliver real customer value
- Stay at the front of the curve: research, prototype, and integrate emerging methods in agentic reasoning, context engineering, and LLM-driven automation.
- Note: This role is not focused on training foundation models — it's about building high-leverage systems on top of them (think "Claude-Code over Claude-Model").
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Proven track record shipping customer-facing products. You've built features users love and can move quickly across the entire stack — frontend, backend, infrastructure.
- Deep, hands-on familiarity with LLMs — evaluation, prompt engineering, tool use, context management, and agentic workflows. You stay current with the latest advances in AI and are excited to experiment with new techniques and apply them to real product problems.
- Strong product sense and design instinct. You have opinions about what makes AI experiences great — and what makes them terrible. You're comfortable working with designers in the earliest stages, before the UX is settled, to collaboratively shape what the product should be. You can wear multiple hats: engineer, product thinker, and user advocate.
Similar roles at other companies
$215K–$250K / yr
Posted 18 days ago
Software Engineer, Applied AI (Staff+)
LightfieldHQ: San Francisco
$220K–$300K / yr
Posted Sep 23, 2026
Founding AI Engineer
NowadaysSan Francisco, California
$130K–$170K / yr
Posted Dec 31, 2025
Applied AI Engineer
Plata CardWorldwide
Pay not posted
Posted Jul 30, 2025
Senior / Staff Product Engineer, Applied AI
LinearNorth America
Listed on Plot's Ashby job board; checked 21 h ago. First seen by us 23 h ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing. We found this board in a public directory and haven't yet confirmed it against the company's own careers page.