AI Platform Engineer, Applied AI

About Us

Circle is building the world’s leading all-in-one platform for online communities. We make it possible for creators, coaches, educators, and businesses to bring together their audience with engaging discussions, live streams, events, chat, courses, and payments — all in one place, all under their own brand.

We’re proud to be a fully remote company of around 200 (and growing!) team members from 30+ countries around the world. We seek exceptional individuals around the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, create a meaningful impact in their own lives. We don't track hours, but we do manage for high expectations very closely. We collaborate across time zones, are highly async, and like to document a lot.

Twice a year, we bring the whole company together in beautiful places around the world for our company offsites. So far, we’ve hosted offsites in Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, Thailand, Colombia, Italy, Ireland, and more, with still more to come!

Check out our Careers page for more about working at Circle.

About the role

The Applied AI team at Circle is at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive innovation for our customers through transformative applications of large language models (LLMs). We build AI-powered features for our customers — AI agents, AI workflows, and AI copilot. As we scale these features to more customers, we're investing in robust infrastructure for measuring, diagnosing, and improving AI system speed and performance.

We're looking for a strong AI Platform Engineer to help establish the foundation for this layer. This is a new focus area for us, with this being the first AI platform engineer hire at Circle. You’ll have significant ownership in shaping how we approach it. This role focuses on production AI systems — building infrastructure to measure and improve them— rather than ML research or model training. If you're excited about making AI systems work reliably at scale, this is for you.

You'll build evaluation frameworks, observability tooling, and diagnostic infrastructure that tells us whether our AI systems are working well and helps identify where and how to improve them. When you find gaps, you'll prototype solutions, validate them with data, and work with the team to implement these improvements.

What you'll be doing

• Build evaluation infrastructure to measure AI system speed and accuracy — both offline (during development) and online (in production).
• Create observability tooling and dashboards that surface quality metrics week-over-week.
• Diagnose quality gaps. When accuracy drops, trace whether it's retrieval, ranking, prompting, or something else causing the issue.
• Experiment with different models and agent configurations, using data to guide decisions.
• Prototype and validate improvements to our RAG pipeline — chunking strategies, retrieval methods, re-ranking approaches.
• Analyze how our customers are using our AI features to help us identify improvements or new areas for development.
• Work closely with other engineers to give them confidence that their changes improve quality.
• Help us stay up-to-date with the cutting-edge AI research, techniques, and tools.

What you'll need to be successful

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, data science, or ML — with a foundation in areas like search/retrieval, information extraction, NLP, or recommendation systems before transitioning to LLM-powered applications.
• Experience building and evaluating AI systems in production — including RAG pipelines, search / retrieval systems, LLM-powered applications, and both offline and LLM-based evaluation frameworks.
• Strong proficiency in Python for prototyping and experimentation.
• Openness to learning Ruby on Rails — our production system is built in Rails, and you'll need to integrate with and instrument the existing codebase.
• Comfortable building infrastructure and tooling (eval pipelines, dashboards, data processing).
• Deep understanding of RAG architecture: chunking strategies, embeddings, retrieval, re-ranking, context management.
• Strong experimentation mindset — you’re comfortable designing and running A/B tests, measuring results, and iterating quickly to discover what works and what doesn’t.
• Strong data analysis skills — you can interpret results, identify patterns, and communicate findings clearly.
• A desire to work in an environment which values speed of iteration and individual autonomy, while also embracing personal accountability and the ability to collaborate effectively as part of a dynamic team.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced environment with a certain level of ambiguity, especially when learning and picking up new technologies when projects require it.
• Strong alignment with our values, find our values on our career page if you haven’t read up on them yet.
• You are proficient in English (spoken, written, and reading) at a CEFR Level C2 / ILR Level 5.

Bonus Points

• Experience with evaluation frameworks (Braintrust, LangSmith, or similar).

$130,000 - $140,000 USD per year

The cash compensation range shown is a starting point. In addition to equity, benefits and perks, your cash compensation is subject to an annual review and increase on a once per year basis.

The fun stuff

• Fully remote: work from anywhere in the world!
• Autonomy and trust to do your job: we care about outcomes over everything else.
• Paid time away: all employees are given 35 days of PTO annually. We also offer a paid sabbatical after 5 years.
• Generous U.S. benchmarked compensation and startup equity no matter where you are in the world.*
• Awesome medical coverage with 100% coverage for you and your family, or medical reimbursement options where applicable!*
• Parental leave for parents expanding their family, or just starting one.
• Home office stipend to help you get up and running.
• Learning & development stipend to help you level up your professional skills.
• Annual bonus potential for roles that don't already receive variable income or commission.
• Company retreats: Twice a year, the Circle team gets together for a fully paid company retreat in incredible places around the world! We’ve had past retreats in Colombia, Portugal, and Mexico, with more planned on the horizon.
• Check out our Careers page for more.

*Your role, location and unique circumstance may affect this.

Candidate Safety & Interview Process Notice

At Circle, the safety and trust of our candidates is extremely important to us. Unfortunately, recruiting fraud is increasingly common in the job market, and bad actors sometimes impersonate companies or employees.

To help protect you, here’s what you can expect from our hiring process:

How Our Process Works

• All applications are submitted through our official applicant tracking system (Greenhouse).
• If selected to move forward, you may be invited to record a short introductory video, or directly into a live interview.
• All live interviews are conducted face-to-face over video (Zoom or Google Meet) with a member of the Circle team.
• We do not conduct text-only interviews.
• We do not conduct interviews via chat apps or messaging platforms.
• We do not use AI bots to interview candidates.
• Official Communication Channels
• All official communication from Circle will come from [email protected], or an email address ending in @circle.co or @circle.so.
• We will never contact you from unofficial domains (such as “.team”, “.careers”, or similar variations).
• We will never request sensitive personal information early in the process, or ask for payment of any kind.
• If you receive a suspicious message claiming to be from Circle, please do not respond.

We appreciate your vigilance, and look forward to connecting with you through our official channels.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

As a fully-remote international company, diversity is baked into our DNA. Here’s how our CEO, Sid Yadav, frames our hiring mission: “let’s find talent in underserved and under-represented corners of the world, set them up to do the best work of their lives, and in turn, change their life.” To achieve this hiring mission, we offer competitive U.S. benchmarked compensation no matter where someone’s located in the world, and we proactively seek candidates who expand representation of backgrounds, cultures and lived experiences in our teams.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Circle is an equal opportunity employer and as such, we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. If you require any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.