AI Engineer

Department: Gen AI & LLM Team

Location: Remote

Job Type: Full Time

About Us:

Founded in 2016, ELSA harnesses the power of generative AI to improve English communication skills globally, with headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Lisbon, Tokyo, Jakarta, Singapore, and Vietnam. With over 50 million users and 1 billion hours of anonymized data, our AI-driven language learning platform delivers hyper-personalized learning paths for both businesses and individuals, transforming lives and organizations through effective spoken English. ELSA is backed by leading investors including Gradient VenturesGoogles AI fund, Monk's Hill Ventures, and Global Ventures.

At ELSA, our vision is to be the global leader in teaching real-time, conversational English, with the aim of helping over 1.5 billion language learners worldwide. We are here to celebrate and empower every individual on the global stage to build confidence, be understood, and share their story. Come join our very talented team of people working to make a difference with our proprietary speech recognition and AI-driven language learning technology!

About the role:

You will be joining the AI Research Team, a group of experts dedicated to advancing AI-driven language learning technologies.

We are seeking an AI Engineer to drive the development and deployment of LLM-powered capabilities at ELSA. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering and machine learning, focusing on delivering high-quality AI systems that enhance ELSAs conversational tutoring experience. The ideal candidate is a pragmatic AI engineer and an agent of change, pushing the team towards a 3x acceleration in AI-driven development, evaluation, and deployment. You will work closely with researchers and engineers to bridge cutting-edge AI research with scalable, real-world applications.

What will you do:

• Design, build, and deploy AI-powered agents that utilize LLMs for reasoning, retrieval, and action-based workflows.
• Implement intelligent evaluation and feedback loops to measure model performance and continuously improve AI-driven learning experiences.
• Develop scalable AI pipelines and AI Ops workflows to accelerate research-to-production cycles.
• Work with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, LLM orchestration frameworks, and model evaluation techniques to refine conversational experiences.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with researchers, engineers, and product teams to integrate AI seamlessly into ELSAs platform.

What you will need:

• Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI function calling, or similar).
• Experience building agent-based AI systems that integrate multiple tools, APIs, or retrieval methods.
• Strong experience deploying and iterating on AI applications, focusing on user impact rather than just model performance.
• Proficiency in NLP, LLMs, and generative AI frameworks, with experience in both open-source tools like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, and transformer-based models, as well as closed-source models and platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, LangChain, and LangSmith.
• Strong software engineering background, including experience with APIs, microservices, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud services.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with multi-step reasoning models and structured inference techniques (Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts, Graph-based reasoning).
• Hands-on experience with AI agent architectures, including self-improving, multi-agent collaboration tools like DSPy, CrewAI, or Microsoft Autogen.
• Familiarity with memory-augmented AI, knowledge distillation techniques, and continual learning approaches for evolving AI models over time.
• Strong knowledge of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT) and model compression for efficient deployment.
• Understanding of integrating LLMs with external APIs and structured retrieval systems, improving AI accuracy with hybrid search techniques.

Why will you love working here?

• Experience the true spirit of a fast-growing and well-funded Silicon Valley startup.
• Fun energetic team; international and collaborative culture.
• Opportunities to grow professionally and play a critical role in shaping the next stage of the companys growth.

How to apply:

If you are ready to take on this exciting challenge and drive growth for ELSA, please submit your resume and a cover letter detailing your relevant experience and why you are the ideal candidate for this role to .