AI Engineer, Backend

Taste Labs

• $135K — $160K *
Food & Beverages
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in AI system development
  • Proven expertise in building scalable agent harnesses and evaluation systems
  • Strong programming skills with a bias for high-quality code
  • Familiarity with web crawling and data scraping techniques
  • Experience in developing API and inference serving architectures
  • Creative mindset with an interest in subjective domains
  • Startup experience with a flexible, adaptive approach to problem-solving

Responsibilities

  • Develop AI systems that enhance user experience and product functionality
  • Design robust evaluation pipelines for AI models
  • Create scalable infrastructure for data embedding and retrieval
  • Build and maintain web crawling and scraping systems
  • Implement API services for various client-facing applications
  • Conduct security analyses and manage vulnerability assessments
  • Develop reliable tooling and infrastructure to support AI solutions

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AI technology
  • Collaborative environment that encourages innovation and creativity
  • Flexibility in working on diverse and challenging projects
  • Engagement in a fast-paced startup culture
  • Possibility to contribute to open source or personal projects
Full Job Description
About the role

You'll build the AI systems that power taste agent harnesses, memory, evals, tooling, data collection, index, search, graph, crawling, scraping, security and more.

Types of problems you'd work on
  • Craft agent harnesses, memory and self-improvement loops
  • Design evaluation pipelines and synthetic data generation
  • Create embedding and retrieval infrastructure that scales to millions of requests
  • Build crawling and scraping systems for visual data across the web
  • Set up inference serving and APIs for client-facing products
  • Manage security sweeps vulnerability mapping
  • Develop the tooling and infrastructure that makes everything reliable and fast


What matters to us
  • Deeply technical: you're deeply opinionated about what good code means, you have an AI-forward setup while being anti-slop, you care deeply about the craft.
  • You're creative and have genuine curiosity about 'taste' and making subjective domains verifiable
  • You have startup DNA: you move fast, adapt, no such thing as 'not in scope', you like ambiguous, hard problems
  • AI experience: you need experience building AI forward products, systems, agents, models and more.
  • You care about arriving at the simple, clear solution vs. the complex one


Bonus points
  • Open source contributions or personal projects that show you build things because you're curious
  • Background at creative companies (Figma, Notion, Canva, Adobe, Runway, etc.) or companies with strong index building/crawling (e.g. Firecrawl, Brave, Luma, Pika) or data (Mercor, Surge, etc.)

Similar Jobs

More Food & Beverages Jobs

Find similar AI Engineer, Backend jobs: