AI Application Engineer

AI Application Engineer at Datavations 

 

About Datavations 

Datavations is a leading New York-based data and AI software specializing in the $2.3 trillion building materials industry. Our platform, powered by advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, provides manufacturers with a data-driven approach to better service customers and grow their relationships with key accounts. By simplifying massive datasets into actionable business insight, we help businesses make data-driven decisions to optimize pricing, inventory, and product assortment. 

Our values 

• We value execution: momentum is everything 
• Belief in the power of positivity: we are encouraging and take risks 
• Proactive ownership: we are passionate about driving financial value with creative data products 
• Foster collaboration: we welcome help and always extend a helping hand, internally and externally 

About the Role

As an AI Application Engineer, you’ll build the infrastructure, systems, and tooling that power our AI products — enabling our forward-deployed AI engineers to rapidly experiment and deliver user-facing intelligence at scale. This is a role for an excellent backend engineer who codes daily, owns systems end-to-end, and has a genuine passion for building at the cutting edge of AI. You are obsessive about reliability, debuggability, and creating AI systems that are both powerful and predictable.

Your primary mission will be to engineer and deploy sophisticated systems that enable natural language interactions with complex business data. You will play a pivotal role in shaping our technical strategy, collaborating closely with the CTO and product leadership to make critical decisions on architecture, tools, and processes. This is a unique opportunity to apply your deep backend expertise to build and scale core Generative AI products from the ground up.

Responsibilities & skills

• Drive Technical Architecture: Lead the technical design and implementation of our core AI services, translating product requirements into robust, scalable, and secure software.
• Build & Own Backend Systems: Engineer and maintain key backend components with an unwavering emphasis on security, high performance, and clean, scalable architecture.
• Deploy AI at Scale: Design and implement solutions for deploying agentic AI services on AWS, leveraging containerized environments (Docker) and modern infrastructure practices.
• Own CI/CD Processes: Improve and maintain the CI/CD pipelines for our AI applications to ensure seamless, automated, and reliable deployments.
• Integrate AI Agents: Architect the integration of LLM agent frameworks with our ClickHouse database, ensuring secure and efficient data access.
• Champion Observability: Integrate and manage AI observability tooling to monitor model performance, detect drift, and trace agentic workflows.
• Uphold Best Practices: Define and implement best practices for ethical AI, bias mitigation, AI safety, and enterprise security patterns.
• Collaborate and Thrive: Work effectively in a fast-paced, dynamic startup environment, adapting to changing priorities and collaborating across teams to drive results.

 

Experience

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend systems, distributed architecture, and cloud platforms.
• 2+ years of proven, hands-on experience developing and deploying AI/ML-based applications into large-scale production environments.
• Expertise in a general programming language such as Python, Go, Rust, etc. 
• Familiarity with front-end development, particularly Javascript.   
• Knowledge of Git and shell scripting.
• Strong experience deploying applications on AWS (EC2, Lambda, Bedrock, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, Secrets Manager).
• Extensive experience with containerized environments (Docker) and building CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrated experience with LLMs, agent frameworks (LangChain, etc.), RAG systems, vector databases, semantic search, AI observability, model performance monitoring, and drift detection is a strong plus.
• A passion for staying current with AI research, especially in the areas of reasoning, planning, and autonomous systems.
• Experience working in startups or fast-paced, small teams.
• Familiarity with Retool and/or ClickHouse
• Soft Skills: Excellent problem-solving abilities, a strong sense of ownership, and the ability to operate independently to drive a project to completion.
• Able to work hybrid from our NYC office Tues- Thurs

 

Why Join Datavations

• Impact at Scale: Influence a $2.3 trillion industry by shaping how data science accelerates ROI for major manufacturers.
• Autonomy & Growth: Enjoy the freedom to experiment with new technologies and see your ideas realized in production.
• Collaborative Culture: Work alongside a supportive team that values positivity, proactive ownership, and continuous learning.
• Professional Development: Work with Terraform, OpenTelemetry, GenAI coding tools, and modern observability stacks.

Compensation 

The base salary average range for this role is $140k - $180k per year, depending on experience, skills, and alignment with the role’s responsibilities. This range reflects our current expectations for a qualified candidate nationally, but we’re open to discussing the compensation range further for exceptional candidates working from our NYC office. Total compensation may also include equity, performance bonuses, and a comprehensive benefits package.

We’re committed to paying competitively and equitably, and we regularly review our compensation structures to ensure they align with the market and support our values