What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior AI/ML Engineer | Python / Agentic AI / Production ML | Startup Exp position at Optimal?
Senior AI/ML Engineer | Python / Agentic AI / Production ML | Must Have Startup Exp | NYC Onsite
Tech: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, LangChain, Graph Databases, SQL, Go
Salary: $170,000 – $230,000 meaningful equity
Contract: Permanent
Location: New York, NY - onsite 5 days p/w
Eligibility: Must hold existing US work authorisation — no sponsorship available
🚨 Please only apply if you have ALL of the following 🚨
- 3 years building and deploying production ML models in Python (not research/prototyping only)
- Hands-on ML systems architecture — owning pipelines end-to-end
- Experience building agentic AI / LLM-powered systems for real production use
- Strong with graph databases and SQL
- Proven experience thriving in a fast-paced startup / scale-up environment
- Based in NYC or genuinely committed to relocating (5 days onsite)
Join an AI-native intelligence platform that's just closed major early-stage investment and is scaling fast off the back of proven product-market fit with some of the world's biggest brands. After time heads-down as an engineering-led team, they're now opening the product up — and this is the first AI/ML hire driving the next phase.
You'll build the intelligent core of the platform: systems that don't just surface insights, but reason, forecast, and act autonomously across complex enterprise data. Massive ownership, a genuinely high-talent-bar team, and work that drives 8-figure outcomes for enterprise customers.
What you'll do
- Design, build and deploy ML models for demand forecasting, time-series prediction, sentiment analysis and anomaly detection at enterprise scale
- Develop and iterate on the agentic AI architecture — systems that reason across heterogeneous data and take autonomous action
- Own robust ML pipelines: preprocessing, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment
- Architect RAG systems and LLM integrations powering natural-language interfaces and autonomous workflows
- Partner with backend engineers to ship production-grade models — optimised for latency, reliability and scale
- Own model performance end-to-end: monitoring, retraining, continuous improvement
Nice to have
- M.S. or Ph.D. in CS, ML or related field
- Go experience
- Background from a top-tier ML/AI or data-intelligence environment
This is applied AI at its most impactful — real models, real deployment, real business outcomes. If you've built in a startup, can be onsite in NYC, and want serious ownership, get in touch for a fast response.
Salary : $170,000 - $230,000