Founding ML Engineer
Founding ML Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA Work Model: In-office 5 days a week
About Us
At Effective AI, we're building the future of work. We believe the real frontier for AI is not simple, repetitive tasks, but complex knowledge work that demands expertise and multi-step reasoning. That's why we're building sophisticated AI Teammates designed to master complex workflows and collaborate with human experts. We're starting by tackling the trillion-dollar U.S. Property & Casualty insurance market, a space with intricate processes and a rich data environment perfect for this challenge.
We’ve raised $10 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Ventures & Valor Equity Partners.
Our dedicated team is based in San Francisco and thrives on in-person collaboration to solve these challenging problems.
What You'll Do
As a Founding ML Engineer, you will be a crucial part of our initial team, playing a pivotal role in designing, post-training, and deploying the agent loops that power our AI Teammates from the ground up. You will tackle some of the most significant challenges in agentic AI and natural language processing to develop AI Teammates capable of handling core insurance functions like underwriting and claims processing.
More specifically, you will:
Architect and Develop Core ML pipelines: Design, train, and fine-tune state-of-the-art language models (including reinforcement learning agents) to enable long-horizon task completion and complex decision-making.
Implement Nuanced Reasoning: Develop and integrate ML techniques that empower agents to make sound judgments on ambiguous or incomplete data, mimicking human expert reasoning and generalization.
Build Intelligent, Tool-Using Agents: Engineer the ML systems that allow our agents to dynamically select and effectively utilize a diverse set of external tools—including APIs, databases, web searches, and even Excel-based pricing algorithms—to gather facts and take action.
Design and Implement Robust Evaluation Frameworks: Develop and utilize comprehensive evaluation metrics and systems to rigorously test and benchmark agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and ensure reliability and safety in real-world insurance workflows.
Design for Continuous Adaptation and Learning: Create robust ML pipelines and feedback loops that enable agents to learn from new data, adapt to dynamic conditions like changing regulations or market shifts, and continuously improve performance.
Establish MLOps Best Practices: Contribute to the foundational infrastructure for model development, deployment, monitoring, and iteration in production environments.
Who You Are
We're looking for an ambitious and creative builder who is excited to tackle hard problems at the intersection of machine learning and real-world applications.
You have a strong foundation in machine learning fundamentals, algorithms, statistics, and deep learning, demonstrated through high-impact projects or prior work.
You are genuinely passionate about AI and energized by tackling ambiguous challenges from first principles, particularly in areas like agentic AI, NLP, and reasoning.
You possess strong programming skills, particularly in Python, with experience in relevant ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow) and data manipulation libraries (e.g., Pandas, NumPy).
You are a collaborative, fast learner who wants to join a small team and have an outsized impact on product and technical direction.
Experience with MLOps, cloud ML platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), or deploying models in production is a significant plus.
Bonus: Familiarity with or experience in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and post-training techniques (e.g., RLHF, RLAIF) for language models.
Why Join Effective AI?
Tackle Foundational AI Challenges: Work on cutting-edge problems in agentic AI, tool use, and reliable reasoning that will define the future of work.
Massive, Tangible Impact: Your work will directly improve efficiency and decision-making in a trillion-dollar industry.
Founding Team Member: As a key part of our initial team, you'll have significant ownership and play a defining role in our product, culture, and future.
What We Offer:
Highly competitive salary & equity
Flexible PTO
Catered lunches
Best-in-class medical, dental & vision insurance
401k with up to a 4% company match
Mentorship from experienced founders and access to an elite investor network
Monthly team building events & happy hours
Backing from top VCs (Lightspeed, Valor)