Senior Applied AI Engineer at Future - $250K + Equity in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Compensation vs. Market: At $215K–$250K base plus equity, this is well above median for Applied AI / ML Engineer roles in the US, which typically range from $160K–$220K at senior levels. This signals Future is competing aggressively for top talent in a hot market — a green flag for candidates with strong LLM production experience.
Skills You'll Build: This role sits at the cutting edge of applied AI. You'll gain deep, production-tested experience with:
- LLM agent orchestration (LangChain/LangGraph, tool calling, streaming)
- LLM evaluation frameworks (Langfuse, LLM-as-a-judge, rubric design)
- Production AI reliability: prompt caching, token budgets, observability
- AWS AI infrastructure (Bedrock, ECR, Cognito)
These are among the most in-demand skills in the current job market, and hands-on production ownership will distinguish your resume significantly.
Culture Signals: Future appears to be a growth-stage startup — the role emphasizes full ownership from prototype to production, which signals a lean team where individual impact is high. The "no research-only" framing suggests a pragmatic, shipping-first culture.
Green Flags: Flexible PTO, strong benefits, meaningful equity, and a learning stipend indicate a company investing in long-term employee retention. The health-tech domain provides mission-driven work that resonates in interviews and on a resume.
Watch For: Full-cycle ownership at a startup can mean stretched bandwidth — clarify team size and on-call expectations during interviews.
About Us:
Future is building a personalized guidance system for lifelong health. We help people understand what to do next for their body, goals, and stage of life — then support them in turning those decisions into sustained behavior change. By combining AI, human expertise, personal health data, and accountability, Future helps members improve performance today while building the resilience, capacity, and healthspan they need for decades to come.
About the Role
We're looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help us build and ship AI-powered features that directly improve our product experience and business outcomes. This is a hands-on, product-focused role where you'll take ideas from concept to production — designing intelligent systems, validating them with real users, and turning them into reliable, scalable services.
You'll work at the intersection of AI, product, and engineering — partnering closely with cross-functional teams to identify high-impact opportunities, prototype quickly, and iterate based on data. This isn't a research-only role. You'll own the full lifecycle: experimentation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
The ideal candidate is excited about applying LLMs and modern ML tooling to real-world problems. You think in terms of systems, tradeoffs, and outcomes — not just models. You care about performance, quality, latency, and cost in production. Most importantly, you're motivated by shipping impactful AI experiences that customers actually use.
What You'll Do
- Build and ship AI agents that serve real users: tool-calling LLM systems with structured output, parallel API orchestration, and streaming responses.
- Design evaluation harnesses and quality scoring — using Langfuse, rubrics to measure safety, effectiveness, and personalization.
- Own the full loop: prototype a new agent capability, validate it with evals, deploy it to staging and production, monitor traces, and iterate.
- Improve reliability, latency, and cost through prompt caching strategies, token budgets, retry logic, and observability.
- Write the tools agents use: API integrations with Pydantic validation, exercise search over local databases, structured workout submission.
What You Bring
- Strong Python skills: you've built and deployed services on large production systems.
- Experience with LangChain/LangGraph or similar agent frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs in production: prompt engineering, tool/function calling, structured output, evaluation.
- Comfort with async Python, HTTP APIs, and streaming protocols (SSE, webhooks).
- Experience with data validation and schema design (Pydantic, JSON Schema).
- Ability to debug across layers: from a broken LLM tool call to a misconfigured Terraform resource.
- Clear communication: you'll work directly with product, mobile, and backend engineers.
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with AWS (Bedrock, ECR, CloudFront, S3, Cognito) or other cloud agent hosting.
- Observability and tracing tools (Langfuse, OpenTelemetry, Datadog).
- Exposure to evaluation frameworks: LLM-as-a-judge, automated scoring, dataset management.
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK).
Compensation & Benefits
Base Salary: $215,000–$250,000/year + equity. The salary range is set based on multiple considerations including business needs, market demands, talent availability, experience, and unique skills and attributes. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.
Equity: Meaningful equity participation offered alongside base compensation.
Health Coverage: Comprehensive medical, vision, dental, and disability insurance plus tax savings accounts for all eligible employees.
Retirement: 401(k) plan with tax-advantaged savings options.
Remote-First: Employment eligible to all employees located anywhere in the continental US. No travel required.
Wellness & Development: Monthly health and fitness stipend contributing to overall wellbeing, access to a mental health platform, reimbursement for medical travel, and an annual learning & development stipend.
Flexible Time Off: Flexible PTO so you can rest, recharge, and take care of life outside of work.
Future Membership: Enjoy our platform for free!
Equal Employment Opportunities at Future
We are committed to building a future where every member of our community is healthy, cared for, and advancing forward together. Future is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, age, civil or family status, disability, or race.
Frequently Asked Questions
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