Founding Applied ML Engineer
David Joseph & Company
San Francisco, CA, US
Onsite
2026-07-03
Announced salary
$130,000 - $250,000
Low
$113K
Median
$149K
High
$196K
Market in San Francisco · BLS OEWS 2025
Estimated net pay
$7,697 - $13,688
/month · 29% withheld
after tax & contributions · Single, no dependents
Job description
**Founding Applied ML Engineer**
--------------------------------
**San Francisco, CA · On\-site · Full\-time**
**Compensation:** $130,000–$250,000 \+ 0%–4% equity
### **About the Company**
An early\-stage, venture\-backed company building the optimization platform for agentic commerce — helping ecommerce and retail brands understand, improve, and monetize how their products show up across AI shopping agents. Growing 50% month over month, the team works directly with brands navigating the shift from traditional search to AI agent\-driven discovery.
Founded 2025 · 1–10 people · Industry: AI Tools
### **The Role**
Engineer number one. You are not joining an engineering team — you are helping build one. The role spans product engineering across the full stack plus applied ML judgment to build reliable AI systems: ranking systems, evals, attribution models, agents, and automation loops that customers actually trust. You will work directly with customers, own product and infrastructure decisions, and help shape what gets built and how as the market evolves in real time.
**What you'll be doing**
* Build custom ML models to classify prompts, predict opportunity, and prioritize what brands should optimize for
* Design and ship ranking, scoring, and evaluation systems for noisy AI commerce outputs
* Build incrementality and attribution systems that connect AI visibility to revenue outcomes
* Develop data pipelines to collect signals and turn them into usable product intelligence
* Move between modeling, analysis, implementation, and product decisions without waiting for direction
* Own core AI workflows and make them reliable with queues, retries, observability, evals, and orchestration
**Tech stack:** Python, SQL; TypeScript, Express, React for full\-stack / customer\-facing work when needed
### **Requirements**
* 3\+ years applied ML or data science in production
* Full\-stack Python and SQL, ship independently
* Ranking, attribution, forecasting, or produ