AI Engineer
Location: San Francisco (3 days per week in office)
Cleanlab is on a mission to democratize safe, trustworthy, and reliable generative AI. We’re the team behind cleanlab, the popular open-source framework for ML data quality with 10k+ GitHub stars, used by top companies worldwide. Our research has been published in top AI conferences. We productionize our research in the form of APIs and web applications to help organizations tackle one of generative AI’s biggest challenges: ensuring safe and reliable outputs at scale.
The role
As an AI Engineer at Cleanlab, you’ll architect and build the critical infrastructure behind the Cleanlab AI safety and reliability platform (TLM and Codex) that detects, evaluates, and remediates problematic outputs from generative AI systems. You’ll work on technically challenging problems at the intersection of distributed systems, ML infrastructure, and data engineering to build technology that helps organizations deploy AI with confidence.
Requirements: 5+ years of software engineering experience and building production systems from scratch.
What you might work on
- Designing and implementing backend features to support real-time evaluation, issue detection, visualization, interpretation, and remediation of AI outputs
- Optimizing our systems for scalability, reliability, and low latency
- Ideating and prototyping novel product features enabled by our research
- Collaborating with our data scientists and machine learning engineers to integrate feedback
Technical environment
You’ll work with a modern, cloud-native stack:
- Core: Python, FastAPI, asyncio
- Data: Postgres/pgvector
- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform
- Cloud: Multi-cloud across AWS, Azure, and GCP
Ideal qualities
We’re looking for engineers who are:
- Zero-to-one builders who are comfortable building systems from scratch
- System thinkers who design elegant architectures that anticipate future needs
- Problem solvers who thrive on tackling complex technical challenges without clear solutions
- Craftspeople who take pride in writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code
- Fast learners who quickly adapt to new technologies and domains
- Communicators who can explain technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical teammates
Experience that stands out
While we value the depth that comes with 5+ years of engineering experience, we care more about impact than years. What makes candidates truly stand out:
- Production systems experience: You’ve built and maintained systems that real users depend on
- Python expertise: You know the language deeply, including its strengths and weaknesses for backend systems
- API design experience: You’ve created intuitive interfaces that developers love to use
- Distributed systems knowledge: You understand the challenges of building reliable, scalable services
Team and growth
You’ll join a tight-knit engineering team working directly with our founders (3 ML/systems PhDs from MIT). As an early team member, you’ll have significant input on architecture decisions and the opportunity to grow into a technical leadership role as we scale.
We operate with the speed of a startup while maintaining a sustainable pace that allows for deep work. We believe the best engineers need time to think, experiment, and occasionally go down rabbit holes to find elegant solutions.
Cleanlab strives to be a place where high-potential individuals come together to build something great. We value grit and the ability to learn quickly as much as skill and experience. If you’re a great hacker, you believe in our mission, and you identify with our culture, we want to talk to you — even if your background doesn’t perfectly match this description.
How to apply
- Apply here: https://cleanlab.ai/apply
Benefits
Working at Cleanlab is awesome! Beyond the opportunity to work at a well-funded AI startup with an incredible, friendly founding team of MIT graduates, all full-time employees receive the following:
- Premium health insurance, including dental and vision.
- Professional development stipend to keep up with the latest innovations in ML and software.
- 401(k) with employer match.
- Unlimited PTO, unlimited sick days, 10 company-wide holidays.
- Work with a talented team unified by a vision to solve challenging problems in artificial intelligence.
- Competitive salary (+ equity offering for certain roles), with regular opportunities for a raise if things are going well.
- Relocation bonus to move to San Francisco.
The compensation range for this role is $150,000 to $300,000. The final offer details are determined by several factors including candidate experience/expertise and may vary from the pay range provided.
About us
Prior to Cleanlab, our founders (3 ML/systems PhDs from MIT) worked at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, AWS, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Dropbox, Oculus, Palantir, NASA, General Electric, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. At every place we worked we repeatedly encountered the same issue: AI solutions failed to work reliably on real-world, human-centric data due to label errors and poor data quality. So, we spent eight years of PhD research at MIT inventing a new field to solve this problem and after successful pilots with world-leading organizations, Cleanlab emerged.
Everything we do at Cleanlab is guided by our north star — to help companies build reliable AI applications — unlocking the ability to use AI on many real-world applications where reliability is paramount. We develop next-generation data-centric AI, open-source algorithms and build APIs and web applications to help individuals and teams at companies across all industries build reliable AI.
While many companies can help build AI models, there exist few solutions today to build make this AI reliable, which is essential for production deployments of AI. This is where you come in. At Cleanlab, you’ll be able to take ownership of critical projects that pioneer the future of AI reliability.
We are a hybrid company, with over half of our team (and office) located in San Francisco.