Applied AI Engineer

Softway is a people-first consulting firm in the business of AI transformation. We believe AI should enhance human judgement, creativity, and connection — not replace it.

This is an AI builder role. We're looking for people who combine technical execution with a AI consultant mindset — people who can understand business problems, guide stakeholders through ambiguity, and shape practical AI solutions, not just ship features.

This is not an ML research role. It is not a prompt-engineer role. It is for engineers who can take an unclear human problem and ship a working AI system that earns its place in a workflow.

What You'll Do

• Agentic systems — multi-step agents that plan, call tools, and recover from failures.
• RAG and retrieval pipelines over real client data — embeddings, vector stores, hybrid search, reranking, evaluation.
• AI features inside existing products — LLMs into web apps, internal tooling, workflow software.
• Evaluation harnesses — because shipping AI without an eval loop is shipping a guess.
• Production-grade prototypes a client can actually use
• Architecture decisions: model choice, context strategy, memory, orchestration, cost/latency/risk trade-offs.
• Ship in small, fast loops. Question the brief. Care how the thing feels in someone's hand.
• Collaborate across Softway's multidisciplinary team : strategy, culture, creative to make sure what you build is grounded in real human outcomes.
• Stay ahead of what's emerging in the AI-native stack and bring it back. We expect you to be reading, building, and sharing constantly.

What You Need to Bring

• 2–5 years of engineering experience, with at least one shipped AI system in production — work, side project, or open source. We don't care where, only that it's real.
• Comfort across the AI stack: LLM APIs, prompting, embeddings, vector DBs, agent frameworks (or the judgment to skip them), evals.
• Fluent in Python or TypeScript; passable in the other. Web fundamentals — APIs, auth, enough frontend to stand up a usable interface.
• Cloud comfort — deploying to AWS, GCP, Azure, Vercel, Modal or similar without hand-holding.
• Engineering discipline — you test what matters, read code carefully, and don't ship what you can't explain.
• Ability to communicate effectively in client-facing settings, including leading technical discussions, facilitating workshops, and presenting to senior stakeholders

Good to Have

• Real evaluation experience — you've built an eval set and used it to make a decision.
• Experience building and deploying AI/ML models including LLMs, NLP models, recommendation systems and predictive analytics solutions.
• Multimodal work (vision, audio, document parsing) or background in product/design thinking.
• A public portfolio — open source, technical writing, talks, or visible AI work.

Why Softway

Flat team, real ownership, and a culture that's actually building through the AI shift — not just talking about it. We work hard, ship fast, and protect time: alternate Fridays off every month as part of our 4-day-week rhythm.

And we believe deeply in face-to-face, heart-to-heart — the best work, the best decisions, and the best teams happen in the same room. In-person collaboration is part of how we operate, not a footnote.

How we hire

Every candidate receives a real challenge, a problem close to the work we actually do. We evaluate your submission and your resume together. Then a Builder Day, a full day working alongside our team on actual problems, not a performance.

Applications close on 29th May 2025.

Click on Apply . The challenge brief is waiting on the other side!!