Senior Software Engineer - AI Products

About Gem

Gem is the only AI-first all-in-one recruiting platform. Over 1,000 industry leaders including Anthropic, Reddit, Figma, Zillow, Robinhood, and DoorDash trust Gem to fuel their growth and recognize Gem as one of the highest-satisfaction products on G2 with a 4.8/5.0 rating. The company has raised $148M from renown investors including Accel, Greylock, ICONIQ, Sapphire, and Meritech.
We work in our San Francisco office three days per week. In-person collaboration is core to how we ship quickly and build great products together. We offer relocation assistance for strong candidates interested in joining us in SF.

About the Role

We're hiring senior and staff engineers to join our AI product engineering team. Here's what makes this different: at Gem, software engineers don't just build around models, they work directly on them. You'll fine-tune LLMs and embedding models, rethink our search architecture, clean and optimize data flows, and make calls on what systems and infrastructure we use. This team provides high ownership with the opportunity to experiment, prototype and then ship to tproduction. Nothing is off the table if it makes our search faster and more accurate.
This is hands-on work from end to end. You'll integrate directly with LLMs and rerankers, experiment with new models as they launch, build evaluation systems to measure what actually matters, and own the entire stack from Snowflake data pipelines to embedding queries to the UI someone sees in their browser.
Recruiting is an industry ripe for AI transformation, the features you build will directly help companies discover and hire exceptional talent, impacting their success. Unlike generic ML tooling, the work you do here changes how teams scale and how people land meaningful jobs.

What You’ll Build

• Model work: fine-tuning LLMs and embedding models for recruiting queries, testing new providers as they launch, building systems to evaluate what actually improves search quality
• Search at scale: making semantic search instant across 800M+ profiles, integrating rerankers to surface better candidates, designing the feedback loops that help search get smarter
• Data infrastructure: owning pipelines in Snowflake that feed our models, cleaning and structuring candidate data, building the systems that let us experiment quickly without breaking production
• Shipping full-stack features: writing the code from prompt engineering to UI, creating interfaces that make complex search feel simple, iterating based on what recruiters actually tell us

What You Bring

About You

• You have 5+ years of industry experience as a software engineer, building user-facing products.
• You enjoy mentoring, working cross-functionally, and working directly with customers.
• You move with velocity and invest in improving your craft.
• You prioritize technical quality, building reliable and scalable systems.
• You are product-oriented and you don’t hesitate in making decisions.
• You are energized by collaborating in-office with your peers in a hybrid model.

Extra Credit:

• You've built agents or worked on eval infrastructure
• You know your way around vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant) or search systems (Elasticsearch)
• You've worked with RAG architectures or ML observability
• You've worked at an early-stage startup where you had to figure things out yourself
• Background in information retrieval, ranking, NLP, or recommendation systems
• Experience with data pipelines (Snowflake, dbt), model deployment, or monitoring models in production
• Comfortable in Python and working with ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow

How We Work

We've removed most development friction:

• Local dev with Vite boots instantly with hot-reload
• CI runs in ~10 minutes, deploys go straight to production
• We ship fast and iterate based on customer feedback

Our engineering culture:

• Reasonable hours
• Weekly team events and happy hours
• Regular hackathons for experimental features
• Team from Meta, Uber, and Dropbox

This role offers the chance to work on a small, world-class team (ex-Meta, Uber, Dropbox) building real products in a fast-moving, user-focused environment. You’ll have high ownership, lots of say in how we build, and the opportunity to shape both technology and team norms as we scale. If you’re excited by the idea of shipping something impactful, iterating quickly, and seeing your work change how companies hire – we’d love to talk to you.

Benefits

• 10-year stock option exercise window
• Flexible Time Off and 16 paid holidays (including company wellnes