Applied AI Engineer

About Kairos

Kairos is building specialized intelligence.

We are backed by Y Combinator, and work with organizations in regulated industries to build domain expert-level agents that outperform frontier models.

General-purpose models know what the world has published. They don’t know the private judgment that makes a company exceptional: the intuition, experience, and unwritten standards its best people use.

We turn that judgment into AI systems that take on the most demanding operational work. They’re engineered to meet the reliability standards high-stakes environments require. Our north star is to bridge the AI adoption gap, while enabling each company to own the intelligence they create.

We are a small technical team entering a period of rapid growth, and are hiring Applied AI Engineers to build agents that perform meaningful work for enterprises.

The Role

You will work directly with customers to turn messy requirements into robust, end-to-end agents. You will own each system from architecture through deployment, including integrations, evaluation, and privacy.

We engineer models toward deterministic system behavior. You will formalize expert judgment into evaluations, identify where behavior breaks, and build the feedback loops that make reliability repeatable.

You will leverage and extend the Kairos platform, developing techniques that make long-horizon agents more capable, reliable, and verifiable on judgment-heavy work.

We’re hiring immediately for an initial term through December, with the potential to continue full-time. You’ll receive competitive compensation and work alongside the founding team in person from San Francisco’s Marina/Russian Hill.

What we’re looking for

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and deep Python/backend experience
• Exceptional communication skills and confidence engaging with enterprise customers.
• Experience with RL, fine-tuning, and retrieval systems.
• Familiarity working across enterprise cloud infrastructure, CRMs, and internal data platforms.
• Strong intuition for product and UX.
• A high bar for correctness and production reliability.

Bonus

• Experience with long-horizon agents or multi-step LLM workflows.
• You’ve published AI/ML papers at conferences.
• Previous experience as a founder or founding engineer.