AI/ML Engineer – SDE 2

🚀 About Thrifty AI

We're building AI employees that can see, hear, speak, reason, and take action. Thrifty AI builds artificial humans and agentic AI systems for enterprises and government organizations. Our work spans real-time AI avatars, voice AI, LLM-powered agents, and autonomous workflows that operate across digital and physical environments. We're backed by Google for Startups, supported by India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and part of NVIDIA Inception. We're a hands-on engineering team working to turn advances in AI into reliable systems that work in production.

📐 About the role

We're looking for an AI/ML Engineer who can build, develop, and deploy real-world AI applications from concept to production. You'll work on LLM-powered applications, AI agents, retrieval systems, and intelligent automation, turning complex problems into scalable, reliable solutions. From designing backend systems and integrating AI capabilities to debugging, testing, and optimizing performance, you'll contribute across the entire development lifecycle. This role goes beyond experimentation or basic API integrations. We value strong engineering fundamentals, hands-on problem-solving, and the ability to build AI systems that are reliable, efficient, and ready for real-world use. You'll collaborate closely with the founders and engineering team, take ownership of meaningful projects, and help shape the architecture and direction of AI-powered products.

🦸🏻‍♀️ What you’ll do

  • Design, develop, and deploy AI/ML solutions for real-world business problems.
  • Build and integrate LLM-powered applications, AI agents, and intelligent automation workflows.
  • Develop backend services, APIs, and system integrations to support AI-driven products.
  • Work with RAG pipelines, vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval techniques to improve AI application performance.
  • Implement multi-agent workflows, tool calling, and context management where required.
  • Evaluate AI model outputs, troubleshoot issues, and improve accuracy, reliability, and performance.
  • Optimize AI applications for scalability, response time, and cost efficiency.
  • Collaborate with founders, product teams, and engineers to translate business requirements into production-ready solutions.
  • Take ownership of features across the development lifecycle, from design and implementation to deployment and continuous improvement.

⭐️ What we're looking for

  • 3–4 years of relevant professional experience in software engineering or AI/ML engineering.
  • Strong proficiency in Python and a solid understanding of software engineering principles.
  • Hands-on experience developing and deploying LLM-powered applications and AI solutions.
  • Practical knowledge of RAG, embeddings, information retrieval, tool calling, and AI agent workflows.
  • Experience building APIs, backend services, database integrations, and production-ready systems.
  • Ability to troubleshoot complex issues, analyze problems, and make informed technical decisions.
  • Strong ownership mindset with the ability to independently manage tasks, solve problems, and deliver results.

🍩 Good to have

  • Experience with LangGraph or other agent orchestration frameworks.
  • Experience with LLM evaluation, tracing, observability, and systematic testing.
  • Familiarity with Docker, cloud infrastructure, GPU inference, or model serving.
  • Experience with real-time voice AI, streaming systems, multimodal models, or AI avatars.
  • Experience deploying AI systems in enterprise or on-premises environments.

The Experience at Thrifty AI

  • Build with Purpose: Work closely with founders and engineers to solve meaningful problems and turn ideas into production-ready AI solutions.
  • Take Ownership: Drive features from concept to deployment, contribute to technical decisions, and see the direct impact of your work.
  • Explore What's Next: Work with agentic AI, voice AI, multimodal systems, and emerging technologies that solve real-world challenges.
  • Learn by Building: Experiment, test new approaches, learn from challenges, and continuously improve the systems you build
  • Grow with Impact: Be part of a hands-on engineering environment with opportunities for professional growth, competitive compensation, and potential ESOP participation, subject to company policies.

Thrifty AI is an equal-opportunity employer and is committed to diversity. We don't make hiring or employment decisions based on race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state or federal law.

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