Staff AI Engineer
Spara
Company Description
Every company in the world will offer human intelligence-level sales conversations to all of their customers. Spara is building AI agents to handle this explosion of inbound sales touchpoints. This is one of the most complex, high revenue-generating, and high brand risk problems that companies are looking for AI solutions in.
Our Total Addressable Market is $28B: 1M+ US sales reps will be replaced by AI-powered conversations, with technology capturing 30% of their economic value today. Our MVP targets the 192k US companies using a top 6 CRM: 2% adoption at $45k annual recurring revenue is an achievable $173M annual recurring revenue by 2026. We are building a multi-billion dollar AI-first company.
Spara has raised $15M from top-tier venture capital firms, led by Radical Ventures & Inspired Capital; AI luminaries including the founders of PyTorch and Google Cloud TPU, as well as the Head of Sales at Anthropic and Head of Platform Sales at OpenAI; and C-suite angel investments from early customers, including multiple $100M+ revenue businesses.
David Walker and Zander Pease are a proven, complementary founding team. David was co-founder/CEO of Triplemint, where he ran training, coaching, and operations for a 250 person sales team. He grew the company to successful acquisition and now sits on the board of The Agency RE, a $250M revenue business. Zander was the technical co-founder of Nomad Health, now a post-Series D company; he most recently ran Platform at Hyperscience AI, building a workflow orchestration layer for computer vision models.
Job Description
We are seeking a Staff ML Engineer with a passion for building application-layer AI for high consequence, complex user interactions.
In this role, you will:
Ideate, design, and run experiments to improve Spara's AI behavior across multiple dimensions.
Prompt engineer, finetune, and orchestrate a pipeline of third party models.
Manage a pipeline of synthetic and live customer data sets.
Provide input on the design of Spara's proprietary model pipeline to achieve core product roadmap goals.
Stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, especially relating to nascent AI-native application development, to drive innovation and technical excellence.
Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the engineering organization.
Help mentor other team members.
Report to the VP of Software Engineering.
Spara is built with a cutting-edge stack:
FastAPI, React / Typescript, Vite, tailwind
Multiple foundational models, including OpenAI, along with pgvector
Langchain and evaluation frameworks in Langsmith
Google Cloud, Docker
Qualifications
6+ years experience architecting and building large-scale machine learning projects
Strong technical background and understanding of software development and machine learning methodologies, tools, and technologies across the stack.
Experience working in a lightweight, early-stage environment and helping to define solutions in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Machine Learning. PhD optional.
3 days per week in our Manhattan-based office. Optionally work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Benefits
Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.
Opportunities for professional growth and development.
Work-life balance and flexible work arrangements.
Collaborative and inclusive work environment.