AI Software Engineer

About Inventive

At Inventive, we build AI agents for sales teams that help them win deals. Our current set of agents helps vendors automate parts of the RFP process, thus helping them drive efficiency and effectiveness. In the US alone, more than $1 trillion worth of projects across public and private sectors are allocated via RFPs and tenders, and hundreds of thousands of organizations bid on these projects. Our clients see an average improvement of 70+% in their workflows, and they receive high-quality proposals, significantly enhancing their chances of securing successful deals.

A bit more about the company:

• We graduated from YCombinator in the summer of 2023
• We have a raised $4Mn seed round from Valley's top investors (General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, Soma Cap, and top angels).
• Our founding team comprises a repeat founder with a successful exit (post series-B, 150 employees), and product & research leaders from Google AI and Stanford AI.
• We are early but moving and growing fast.

Responsibilities

We seek an exceptional AI engineer to help build and scale AI native features and workflows.

• Deliver true next-generation AI agent-based solutions by training, testing & deploying AI systems.
• Take ownership of the end-to-end AI infrastructure, optimize it, and improve stability and accuracy.
• Develop ML models and AI solutions, and improve existing AI pipelines across various workflows to provide a better user experience.
• Bring new ideas, be data-driven, iterate quickly, and build original solutions to critical user problems. Collaborate with the rest of the engineering and design teams to build scalable solutions.

Ideal Candidate

• Be a self-starter, demonstrate extreme ownership, and have a passion for shipping high-quality products.
• Strong proficiency in Python programming, with the ability to work across the full stack. Our tech stack includes Python, TypeScript (NextJS), Docker, AWS, Redis and Postgresql.
• 6+ years of experience building high-quality, production-grade AI systems.
• 2+ years of experience in working with LLMs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Llama, etc, and a deep understanding of prompting and finetuning techniques.
• Expertise in developing software for Generative AI applications.

Important Notice

This is a fully in-person role. Please apply only if you are already in the SF Bay Area or can relocate. This means that you should either be a US citizen, or permanent resident or be in the US on a valid visa that will allow you to work in the US.

Phone Screen

This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

The conversation will cover some light technical discussion about building generative AI applications and your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship AI systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions.

Technical Screen

Our first technical screen will be remote, and is intended as a first pass to assess basic AI skills. You will work on a 1-hour practical problem, implementing the web back-end and AI layer for a simple RAG application.

For this project, you should have a full stack web environment set up, a relational database AND a vector database already running on your machine. Here at Inventive, we use Django + Postgres, but anything else you are familiar also works. To make the most of the time, you should have a working project set up before the interview.

During the interview, you’re also free to google for syntax. You are welcome to use AI to help with code completion.

Onsite Interview

Each interview is 1 hour long, with 45 minutes allocated for the technical portion, and 10-15 minutes for Q&A. We don’t always do all the interviews, and we take it on a case-by-case basis. Details:

• AI exercise: We will go through the exercise of evaluating an LLM RAG pipeline. Evaluations are extremely important for us to be able to continuously improve an AI system. We want to know how you think about eval metrics to use, the data we can use for it and how well you can implement these ideas.
• Programming exercise: Similar to the technical screen, we will ask one or more short language-agnostic coding questions. We prefer if you an solve this problem in Python. We are interested in hearing how you approach the problem; seeing how you write, test, and debug the solution; and then discussing the tradeoffs of your solution, and how they turned out.
• Database/Schema design: We work primarily with a Postgres relational database, so having experience in schema design and database management is helpful. We’ll share details about a feature we want to build. We want to walk through how you’d create objects and relations, as well as think about performance considerations.
• Interview with founders: Everyone on the software team works extensively with the founders, They’ll ask about your motivations and interests – both at Inventive and beyond – and share more about how instrumental AI is to Inventive’s future.