Senior Applied AI Engineer (Python + LLM Systems) - US REMOTE

Senior Applied AI Engineer (Python + LLM Systems) Remote, U.S. About BrightPlan BrightPlan is a leader in Total Financial Wellness. We provide a comprehensive global solution that addresses all aspects of employees' financial health at every stage of life, empowering HR teams to enhance the employee experience and better attract, retain, and engage talent. We are a remote-first SaaS company building practical AI-powered solutions that improve real financial outcomes for users. Our team values accountability, curiosity, thoughtful execution, and continuous learning. We are expanding our engineering team to build the next generation of AI-powered financial wellness tools. This role is focused on building and shipping practical AI capabilities within a production SaaS platform rather than research-oriented model development. The Role We are looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to help design, build, and scale the systems that power AI across the BrightPlan platform. This role will play an important part in shaping how AI systems evolve within BrightPlan's product architecture. This role focuses on developing reliable, scalable infrastructure and frameworks for LLM-powered applications, enabling the broader engineering team to deliver reliable, high-quality AI features. You will work closely with the CTO to help shape technical decisions around AI architecture, model usage, and system evolution. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys owning complex technical problems and building the systems that make production AI reliable and scalable. This is an opportunity to have significant technical impact in a real-world fintech environment. What You'll Do Design and implement scalable AI services and supporting infrastructure that enable AI-powered product capabilities across the platform Develop solutions for evaluating and improving LLM output quality Build frameworks and tooling that support AI feature development across the engineering team Develop and maintain systems that support model tuning, evaluation, and optimization Contribute directly to deployment and operational reliability of AI services in production environments Optimize AI services for latency, cost efficiency, and reliability Partner with the CTO to evaluate emerging AI capabilities and recommend technical approaches for model usage, architecture, and system design Provide technical guidance to engineers building AI-powered features and help establish effective development patterns and engineering best practices Contribute to technical architecture discussions related to AI systems and platform capabilities What Success Looks Like Contribute meaningfully to establishing reliable systems supporting AI-powered product features within your first 90 days Improve the performance, consistency, and reliability of AI-generated outputs Enable faster experimentation and iteration for AI product development Help establish development patterns and technical practices that enable other engineers to build AI-powered features more effectively Demonstrate strong technical leadership and ownership of AI system design and implementation Qualifications When applying, please include a brief description of one AI-powered feature, service, or system you helped build or support in production. Required 5+ years of software engineering experience, including strong backend or systems development experience Strong Python development experience Experience designing and building backend services or distributed systems Experience integrating LLM APIs, generative AI services, or AI-enabled capabilities into production systems Experience evaluating or improving AI model performance in production environments Strong problem-solving and systems design skills Ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team Nice to Have Experience with FastAPI or similar frameworks Experience with model fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt evaluation, or LLM evaluation methods Experience building internal tooling or infrastructure supporting AI applications Experience working with vector databases or AI data pipelines Experience working in fintech or B2B SaaS environments Why Join BrightPlan Build meaningful technology that helps people improve their financial lives Work on practical AI applications deployed in a live fintech product Collaborate in a remote-first environment with experienced product and engineering leaders Competitive compensation, benefits, and equity Compensation The estimated annual base salary range for this role is $160,000 to $195,000, depending on qualifications, experience, and location.