Applied AI Engineer
Contrario · US ·
- Work mode
- Onsite
- Category
- AI engineering
Contrario · US ·
Contrario is the AI Recruiting Platform powered by expert recruiters. Trusted by teams at every stage for their critical hires. The platform helps companies at every stage hire faster by combining expert recruiters with AI agents that take on the operational work.
We work with 250+ venture-backed companies including Wispr Flow, Listen Labs, and Slash, and a network of 500+ boutique recruiting agencies and recruiters (many formerly at Stripe, Ramp, and Palantir).
In under 6 months, the company has reached $6M in annualized revenue and paid out over $1M to recruiters. We’ve raised $2.3M from Y Combinator, Nexus VP, and angels from Hudson River Trading, Stanford, DoorDash, and OpenAI.
We are scaling aggressively and aiming for:
Our team comes from Stanford, Wispr Flow, Giga, BCG, NASA, SAIL, Berkeley, and Northwestern.
We are hiring an Applied AI Engineer to help build the core infrastructure powering Contrario’s marketplace.
You will work directly with the founders to design and ship ML matching systems, recruiter routing algorithms, search infrastructure, and AI-powered workflows that determine how talent flows across hundreds of startups.
This is a founding engineering role with extremely high ownership.
You will:
The systems you build will determine who gets hired at some of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
Build ML-driven marketplace systems
Develop ranking and retrieval systems that match recruiters, candidates, and roles using embeddings, structured signals, and marketplace data.
Design search and data infrastructure
Build systems that query and rank candidates, recruiters, and roles across large datasets.
Develop AI-native workflows
Ship automation tools that help recruiters source candidates faster and help companies evaluate talent more efficiently.
Ship full-stack product features
Design and implement features across the entire stack — from database schema and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
Own core marketplace infrastructure
Work on systems that power recruiter routing, candidate evaluation pipelines, and marketplace coordination.
Move extremely fast
Launch features quickly, gather feedback from real users, and iterate rapidly.
Strong full-stack engineering ability
Experience building production systems using TypeScript and modern web frameworks (Next.js / React).
Comfort working with AI systems
Experience integrating or building systems using:
Backend and data systems knowledge
Experience designing APIs and working with relational databases.
Product-minded engineer
You care about UX and building systems that users actually love.
High ownership mindset
You can take ambiguous problems and turn them into working systems without heavy direction.
Startup velocity
You ship quickly and are comfortable working in fast-moving environments.
Experience building:
Experience with:
Frontend
Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind
Backend
TypeScript APIs
Database
Supabase (Postgres)
Infrastructure
Vercel
AI / Data
LLMs, embeddings, retrieval pipelines