Applied AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineers: Let 250+ Companies Compete For You Fonzi is an AI recruiting company. No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront. Every week, hiring managers at 250+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about systems, and whether you're the kind of engineer who ships. Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They're backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more. How It Works • 5-minute application • We reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and optimize your profile • Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want • Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you • You only interview where you're genuinely interested • Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime w/ questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination Who We're Looking ForThe applied AI engineers who do best on Fonzi: • Have shipped LLM-powered features to production that real users depend on • Can talk fluently about retrieval, agents, tool calling, context engineering and evals • Measure quality with evals and iterate on prompts, models and pipelines based on the numbers • Combine strong software engineering fundamentals with a close eye on new models and techniques • Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small • Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with experience at at least one high-growth company What You'll BuildThe companies on Fonzi are working on: • Agents that automate complex, multi-step workflows in healthcare, legal, fintech and logistics • Production RAG pipelines and domain-specific knowledge retrieval • Eval frameworks that make AI reliable enough for enterprise customers • AI-native products where the intelligence layer is the product, not a feature • Integrations that put AI directly into the tools customers already use Compensation • $200,000 to $350,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies. The Interview Process (Typical) • Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit and genuine curiosity about AI • Technical deep-dive on how you'd design an AI system for a real problem • Coding or pairing session building an AI feature end-to-end If you've been building with AI because you can't stop thinking about it, we want to hear from you.