Applied AI Engineer
Percepta
Applied AI Engineer
Percepta
Cloud-based video analytics for shoplifting detection
Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology.
To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together:
Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research
Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows
Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more
Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.
Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.
We’re hiring Applied AI Engineers who will work directly with customer executives, operators, and technical teams to define and deliver high-impact AI systems. We don't build prototypes or laboratory projects- you’ll design, build, and ship production-grade AI agents and workflows that drive millions in business value for customers.
Our Applied AI Engineers:
Shape the AI vision: Collaborate with customer stakeholders to define their long-term AI strategy and transformation roadmap.
Identify high-leverage use cases: Work backwards from the long-term vision to surface and prioritize specific AI applications that connect our ambition to measurable business value.
Ship real products: Rapidly build and deploy AI solutions that work in the wild, with real users and real data.
Advance our core product: Encode the lessons from our customer engagements in our Mosaic product, consistently contributing new features, patterns, and abstractions.
AI-nativeness: You're excited about the potential for AI to transform businesses and want to play a hands-on role in bringing frontier technology into critical institutions.
Being generative and collaborative: You love constantly jamming on new “what if” ideas with teammates and partners.
Extreme ownership: You’re willing to jump in and love being the one on the hook. You aren’t going to wait to be pointed at a task—you’re going to identify what you think we should do next, and then do it.
Execution excellence and speed: You can build stuff in messy environments and know how to get code written and shipped quickly. You can hold the balance of speed and quality and know when to push the pace vs. when to slow down.
Customer-obsession and respect: You’re motivated by understanding customer pain points and iterating directly with end users to deliver wins quickly.
Hands-on experience with LLM tooling (LangGraph, Mastra, Agents SDK, etc).
Built and deployed production LLM-powered systems (tool use, RAG pipelines, multi-step agents, human-in-the-loop, etc).
Strong technical foundations in Python/TypeScript, cloud deployment (AWS/GCP/Azure) and DevOps tooling.
Prior startup or founding engineer experience, balancing craft, ownership, and speed.
As an organization, Percepta is committed to inclusion and belonging, and our people are our greatest investment! We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career.
In addition to competitive compensation, equity, 401(k) matching, comprehensive health and family benefits, and lunch every day, we offer a culture built on autonomy and trust. We strongly believe that the boldest solutions come from teams who dream bigger together, and that means bringing in people from every kind of background, experience, and path. We are an office-first team that values the impact of in-person collaboration, but we focus on outcomes over outputs—believing that we are each responsible for solving the "whole problem" to make our customers win.
If you don't check every box on this description but you care deeply about the problems we're tackling, seeking the truth, and wanting to own outcomes alongside a team that has your back, then we want to hear from you! We know self-doubt keeps great people from applying, so please don't count yourself out before we've had the chance to meet you. Tackling the hardest problems takes a range of perspectives in the room, and we believe that's how we build something truly game-changing.
Our company values are more than just words on a page. They inform how our team shows up every day:
Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will.
Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care.
Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy.
Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos.
Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable.
Percepta is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we evaluate every qualified applicant on their merits and give equal consideration for employment regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran or uniformed service status, age, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Percepta provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees in accordance with federal and applicable state law.
Percepta Labs builds cloud-based video analytics for retail loss prevention. It ingests retailers’ existing security camera feeds and uses action recognition and pose estimation to identify behaviors that could indicate shoplifting in real time, then assigns a probability that a theft is happening. The system emphasizes ethical AI by anonymizing demographic features (race, gender, age) to avoid bias and protect privacy. The product is sold to retailers to help reduce shrinkage and improve margins, with early testing claiming higher accuracy than human loss-prevention staff. Percepta’s growth has been supported by a major investment from ADT Commercial, which acquired the company and appointed its co-founder as ADT’s first Director of Artificial Intelligence. The company’s goal is to provide scalable, privacy-conscious video analytics that help retailers prevent theft more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Explore more opportunities at Percepta