Senior AI Engineer @ Prophia

AI & Machine Learning (2)
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AI & Machine Learning (2)

Senior AI Engineer

Location: Remote - Washington D.C., Seattle, Bay Area or Chicago preferred

Commercial Real Estate (“CRE”) is one of the world’s largest asset classes plagued with poor quality data and archaic tools. And because the valuable private building data is trapped in a complex and rapidly evolving IT ecosystem, even the most sophisticated owners/operators and creditors struggle to use data to their competitive advantage.

Founded in 2018, Prophia is the only company that has designed and built a machine learning driven data management platform that helps commercial real estate organizations drive the financial performance of their assets. We are a Series A stage company, having raised over $15M of venture capital to date to deliver trusted data to our customers, providing them with more time, insights, and risk management. Currently, we are operating as a distributed team, with most employees based in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, with additional employees located in the Midwest and East Coast.

About the Role:

It’s an exciting time at Prophia. We’re building a new product from the ground up with generative AI at its core: THE document intelligence platform for CRE—built to scale high-volume data extraction work, streamline data access, and deliver results that previously required human expertise.

As a Senior AI Engineer, you’ll design, build and operate AI features end-to-end: from retrieval pipelines and LLM orchestration to evaluation, safety, and scalable serving. This role is hands-on and deeply technical; you’ll work closely with product, design, and engineering to ship reliable AI experiences in production.

This role differs from others -

Not just a Data Scientist: you won’t primarily do exploratory analysis, business insights or dashboarding; your focus is production AI features.
Not just an ML Engineer: beyond training/serving classic models and MLOps, you’ll own LLM/RAG design, prompt & tool orchestration, evals/guardrails and cost/latency trade-offs for user-facing workflows.

Primary Responsibilities:

Design & implement GenAI systems: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt/agent orchestration, function/tool calling and grounding on Prophia’s CRE corpus. Choose patterns (prompting single LLM calls, context engineering, building agentic workflows) based on task, data, latency and cost.
Own LLMOps in production: build evaluation harnesses (quality, safety, regression), prompt/version management, telemetry, and model routing; monitor drift, latency, and cost.
Vector search & data plumbing: design chunking/embedding strategies; select and operate vector stores (e.g., Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant, Pinecone, pgvector) with an eye on throughput, cost and hybrid search.
Serve at scale: implement high-throughput inference streaming UX, caching and concurrency controls; containerize and deploy to AWS with robust CI/CD.
Collaborate cross-functionally: partner with PM/design to turn requirements into technical plans; with engineers on integration with the main platform and with customer teams to instrument quality signals.
Hands-on prototyping: quickly validate ideas by using AI assisted coding; ship iterative improvements behind feature flags and experiments.
Technical leadership: mentor engineers, establish best practices for AI reliability and observability and help shape our AI architecture.
In the first 90 days, you will:

Stand up an evaluation pipeline for our core GenAI tasks with baseline metrics and pass/fail gates.
Ship one end-to-end LLM-backed workflow into production with telemetry and fallback behavior.
Reduce latency and cost of a critical path by instrumenting caching, batching, or better retrieval.

Qualifications:

Must-haves:

5+ years total software, data science, and/or machine learning experience
Deep fluency in Python; strong systems and API design skills is a big plus.
Proven experience shipping LLM-powered features: prompt/program design, RAG pipelines, agents/tooling, evaluation and safety/guardrails.
Hands-on with vector databases and semantic retrieval (Pinecone/pgvector/weaviate) and embedding models.
Experience with cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure).
Excellent communication; comfortable navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving startup.

Nice-to-haves:

Experience with document AI (OCR, layout parsing), knowledge graphs or evaluation datasets specific to contracts/leases.
Experience with Docker and Kubernetes/AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).
Prior exposure to privacy-preserving techniques and model red-teaming (e.g., prompt injection defenses).
Background in CRE or other data-rich, compliance-sensitive domains is a BIG plus.

Compensation for this role is comprised of an annual salary ranging between $140-170k as well as equity and benefits. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications and experience.

Next Steps:

If you think we may be a good fit for each other, we encourage you to apply! We will get back to you within a week. If we move forward, here is our typical interview process.

A 30 minute phone call with a member of Prophia’s People Team to understand your high-level background and to discuss logistics and expectations.
A 45 minute video call with the hiring manager for the role to dig deeper into relevant experience
A virtual onsite interview round! This stage includes 4-5 interviews with other members of the team focused on Prophia’s company values and how you would demonstrate them if you were to join the organization.

We Offer:

Competitive salary and equity compensation
An amazing team and work environment
Comprehensive health, dental and vision care for you and your family
$150 monthly wellness stipend
Retirement plan (401K)
Flexible time off policy and paid holidays
Generous paid family, medical and bereavement leave policies
Freedom to customize your work and technology set-up as you see fit; flexibility of location

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Prophia is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identify, national origin, veteran or disability status.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the US. In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification document form upon hire.

Senior AI Engineer

Prophia

Compensation Overview

Senior AI Engineer

Location: Remote - Washington D.C., Seattle, Bay Area or Chicago preferred

About the Role:

Primary Responsibilities:

Qualifications:

Next Steps:

We Offer:

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