AI Engineer

Job description

AI is the new electricity. Millions of AI engineers are needed to transform industries with AI, particularly in the realm of GenAI, and we’re building an education platform to train them. With a mission to grow and connect the global AI community, DeepLearning.AI is an education technology company that is empowering the global workforce to build an AI-powered future through world-class education, hands-on training, and a collaborative community. We’re a small tech company with serious credentials, exciting challenges, and wonderful teammates.

DeepLearning.AI is looking for a contract AI Engineer to work within our newly formed Learning Experience Lab. In this role, you will leverage your expertise in software and machine learning to help us build the future of education. A passion for education is a plus in this role. Your technical skills in software development and the AI space, and your ability to communicate and work well with a team will all be critical for this role. Although we are headquartered in Palo Alto, California, we are open to hybrid/remote workers as long as they are within 3 time zones of California (PDT / GMT -7).

This is a remote contractor position open to candidates based in the United States. For U.S.-based candidates, you must either already possess or be eligible to obtain authorization to work.

Here’s what you’ll do:

• Develop  new AI features to be incorporated into platform learning experiences and content creation workflows.
• Use cutting-edge AI technologies to build learning experiences and creative workflows that have never existed before.
• Work with a small team to quickly iterate and ship new features.

You will do this by:

• Learning quickly when it comes to new technologies in the AI space as well as technologies that are new to you.
• Regularly communicating out the status of your work and asking for help or feedback proactively.
• Thinking proactively about how a feature or other piece of technology can be improved.
• Being organized in your work and collaborating on bigger projects to which you are contributing a critical piece.

Here are the skills you should have:

• Technical background in software development, mainly in Python – able to independently develop new software components and integrate them into larger projects. You know how to write clean, robust code and use version control to contribute to a larger project.
• Technical familiarity with machine learning, particularly using LLM APIs and frameworks as part of your work. You should be comfortable and have experience using LLMs in ways that go far beyond just prompting at the chat interface. These include tool calling, agentic workflows, RAG, finetuning, and using popular frameworks / APIs for these things. While you may not be an expert in all these areas, you should be able to demonstrate deep technical understanding of at least a couple of these things and conceptual understanding of the rest.
• Strong early career experience in software development and AI / LLM projects. This could come from some combination of formal study, internships, previous work experience, and side projects.
• Excellent communicator and team player with strong English language skills if not a native speaker yourself.

Bonus if you have:

• Background or expertise in education and / or development of educational technology.
• Experience with application deployment / cloud services.

What you get working with us:

• Being part of a world-class team of education and AI experts trying to change the world.
• Work across cultural and geographical lines alongside our offices in different parts of the world.
• The opportunity to be exceptionally creative with your high-impact ideas.

Our defining values:

• We care deeply about our learners: We let our learner’s needs guide our actions and decisions and put our mission ahead of ourselves.
• We are great at what we do: We strive for excellence in all dimensions, especially in the quality of the content we create and people we hire.
• We default to action: We are comfortable acting with limited information and taking ownership of our decisions.
• We ask why: We ask the hard questions, and are open to being in the wrong. We advocate for the best ideas, not our ideas.
• We are honest and authentic: We are transparent as an organization, over-communicate to build trust and share our failures just as we do our successes.
• We do this together: We help each other grow and succeed and have fun at work, even in a remote environment.

At DeepLearning.AI, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation, and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. DeepLearning.AI believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees are critical to our success as a company. We seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business needs.