Applied AI

About Us

At Artisan, we’re building real AI employees - not copilots, not assistants, but autonomous teammates.

Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR. She finds and researches leads, writes emails in customers’ tone of voice, runs outbound sequences, self-optimizes, and manages email deliverability infrastructure. She learns, adapts, and improves over time - just like a human would.

Human team members use Artisan as their primary working platform, replacing a sprawling stack of sales tools, and have Artisans working alongside them.

We went through Y Combinator (W24) and have raised $35M+ from top investors. We’re at $7M+ ARR, with hundreds of customers including Remote, Quora, and SumUp.

We’re currently working on Ava 2.0, pushing the boundaries of what an autonomous AI employee can do. And we're hiring.

About the Role

This is a rare opportunity to build AI products at the frontier of what’s possible. Your work will directly shape the next generation of autonomous, human-like AI employees that will interact with tens of millions of people every day.

At Artisan, applied AI isn’t a side project - it is the product. You’ll constantly evaluate and integrate the latest advancements across LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web search pipelines, voice AI, talking head avatars, multi-modal reasoning, and beyond. You’ll make Artisans more autonomous, more reliable, and more human in how they work.

You’ll be:

• Evaluating LLMs, choosing the right models for the right tasks, balancing cost, latency, reliability, and accuracy.

• Architecting prompt frameworks and agent behaviors for Ava’s core workflows: email generation, chat interaction, meeting scheduling, prospect research, and more.

• Optimizing multi-step agent chains using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web search integrations, and tool use (e.g. CRMs, calendars, APIs).

• Driving infrastructure choices for routing, orchestration, eval loops, and persistent memory across agents.

• Building safety, trust, and controls into agents, partnering with product to design user guardrails, fail-safes, and success metrics.

• Exploring and deploying emerging modalities from voice AI and talking head technology to multi-modal reasoning - and figuring out how they make Ava more human-like.

• Designing agent workflows that make strategic decisions, self-optimize and adapt in real time, and deliver measurable outcomes autonomously.

What You Bring

• 2+ years shipping real AI products in production - either at an app-layer AI startup or on a foundation model team.

• Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (LangChain, ReAct, Dust, OpenAI Tools, etc).

• Strong background in prompt design, chaining, and retrieval systems (experience with OpenAI’s RAG + web search tools or equivalents is a major plus).

• Experience owning latency, reliability, and cost of LLM-powered systems in production.

• Ability to think like a researcher but ship like an engineer, exploring novel techniques and getting them into users’ hands quickly.

• Excellent communication skills.

Why Join Us

• Build category-defining AI employees that will touch tens of millions of people.

• Work directly with our CEO on core product direction.

• Extremely competitive compensation with meaningful equity and full benefits.

• Autonomy to shape applied AI practices and your team from the ground up.

• Join a fast-moving, mission-driven culture where you’ll ship meaningful work every week.

• Be on the cutting edge of AI research and application - we don’t wait for papers to become products; we make them products.

Details

• Role: Engineering

• Eng type: Machine learning

• Job type: Full-time

• Experience: 3+ years

• Location: San Francisco or NYC (in-person)

• Remote: No

• US visas: Will sponsor