Senior ML Engineer in San Francisco

About Saris AI
We're a San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto based applied AI startup that's building the future of work in the banking industry. Our goal is to tackle the type of automation problems that require long-context reasoning, tool orchestration, and agentic decision-making in an industry where reliability and compliance aren't optional.

We've shipped real agents that handle real customer workflows in production. With a growing customer base and strong revenue traction, we're expanding our engineering team to scale what we've built and push further into what's possible.

Our core engineering team is looking for a Senior ML Engineer who thrives in early-stage, ambiguous environments.

Your mission is to:

• Build and own the ML infrastructure that makes our AI systems reliable and improvable, including eval frameworks, prompt management, and model observability.
• Ship customer-facing AI features on a consistent cadence, balancing new capability delivery with foundational infrastructure work.
• Define and implement the team's approach to evals, LLM routing, prompt engineering, and model selection.
• Build pragmatic standards that improve quality without slowing the team down.
• Contribute to ML technical direction by proactively surfacing trade-offs and architectural options, helping the team make informed decisions on where ML is headed.

Who You Are:

• 4+ years of experience in ML or AI engineering, with a track record of shipping production ML systems.
• Strong hands-on expertise with LLMs, prompt engineering, evals, and model routing.
• Experience building tooling and systems that have real customer impact.
• Pragmatic about tradeoffs: knows when good enough is the right call and avoids over-engineering; would rather ship something useful today than design something perfect next quarter.
• Comfortable working with moderate direction in ambiguous environments, you can take a scoped problem, work through it, and deliver a shipped solution.
• Builds with the end user in mind; understands how ML decisions impact real customers and prioritises customer value over technical elegance.
• Elevates teammates through code review, pairing, and clear communication about technical decisions.

Bonus Points If You:

• Have worked in regulated industries (fintech, banking, healthcare) where compliance and reliability are first-class concerns.
• Have experience with RAG systems, fine-tuning, or open-source LLM deployment alongside closed models.
• Are comfortable across the stack, data pipelines through APIs, and can plug gaps where needed.
• Have used or built prompt management or ML observability tooling.

Why Join Saris AI?

• Join us in building the future of work for the trillion-dollar banking industry using cutting edge AI technology.
• Tackle ambiguous technical challenges with no clear answers — you'll define the ML playbook, not inherit one.
• Competitive compensation with premium benefits and equity package.
• Work with a stellar team of engineers, builders, and leaders; including repeat YC founders with a successful exit (Ready Education).
• We already have production agents live with revenue-generating customers.
• Our team is backed by Tier 1 Silicon Valley VCs.