Senior Applied AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer

Reports To - Head of AI

Supervisory Responsibility - This role currently does not have direct reports.

Ideal Start Date - ASAP

Location - India. This is a hybrid role, and we are prioritizing candidates in the Delhi-NCR region (including Noida, Gurugram, and Delhi). This role is expected to work in the Indian time zone IST.

Travel - This role will be expected to make annual travel 3-4 times domestically in India and 1-2 times internationally to the US. Note, Knit US does US All Team, in-person company events twice per year. Travel is to be less than 12% per year.

About Knit
Knit is building the agentic AI platform that helps enterprise brands run end‑to‑end consumer research. We orchestrate specialized AI agents for surveys, data collection, analysis, and reporting, delivering decision-grade insights to Fortune 1000 brands in hours instead of weeks. In under 2 years, we've partnered with 50+ leading enterprise brands, including Amazon, Mars, NASCAR, JBL, ESPN, and Paramount. Knit has grown 500% in the last 12 months, has ~80 employees globally, and raised $30.6M to date, including a $16.1M Series A in July 2025.

The Opportunity
This isn't a typical AI role. We're looking for a builder at heart to join a high-impact team at the core of our agentic platform in a rapidly evolving AI landscape. This is for the engineer who understands the art of balancing speed with scalability and has a passionate desire to see their work translate directly into user impact. As a member of the team, you will ship ambitious AI-powered features end-to-end and help define an engineering culture that balances extreme velocity with enterprise-grade quality.

What You'll Do

• Own the full development lifecycle of AI features, knowing precisely when to build a scrappy MVP to test a hypothesis and when to engineer a robust system for a general release.
• Architect and own pragmatic MLOps and data pipelines that prioritize rapid experimentation. You'll build the "factory for the factory," including CI/CD for prompts, automated evaluations, and performance monitoring.
• Drive model performance, achieving high accuracy, explainability, and efficiency to ensure our AI solves real-world business problems and delights users.
• Make critical architectural decisions, obsessing over operational excellence. You'll optimize for cost, latency, and reliability across the system - caching, model selection, fine-tuning, and infrastructure.
• Serve as a key partner to product and design, translating ambiguous business needs into concrete technical specifications and championing the "why" behind what you're building.
• Operate what you build. This includes on‑call ownership, leading incident response, and driving learning through blameless postmortems.

What Success Looks Like (Our KPIs)

• Product Impact - You drive measurable improvements in user adoption, satisfaction, and time-to-value for AI-driven features.
• Execution Velocity - You accelerate the cycle time from idea to deployment through rapid prototyping, effective prioritization, and building efficient evaluation frameworks.
• Model Performance - You achieve high accuracy, explainability, and efficiency in deployed AI models, ensuring they are robust and solve the intended business problem.
• Operational Excellence - You implement scalable and reliable systems that balance the immediate needs of an MVP with the long-term requirements of a general release.

This Role IS for You If...

• You have deep, hands-on experience. You have 4+ years of experience developing, fine-tuning, and deploying LLMs and other ML models to solve real-world business problems.
• You have a proven track record in a high-growth startup environment (Seed - Series C). You're comfortable with ambiguity, wear multiple hats, and know how to build for both early-stage hustle and later-stage scale.
• You are a hands-on pragmatist. You excel at turning ambiguity into shipped products and have a systematic approach to rapid prototyping, evaluation, and validation.
• You think like an owner. You don't wait for a ticket; you identify problems and propose solutions. Your success is measured by the product impact you deliver for our users and the business.
• You use AI as leverage. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude are integral to your workflow, helping you ship faster while you maintain a high bar for correctness.
• You communicate crisply. You write things down, prefer a whiteboard session over a long thread, and thrive in tight feedback loops with product, design, and customers.

This Role is NOT for You If...

• You need a well-defined roadmap and a highly structured environment.
• You see a hard line between "AI," "backend," and "product."
• You are uncomfortable with ambiguity, rapid context-switching, and dynamic priorities.
• You are looking for a predictable, 9-to-5 role.

Our Stack (you don't need all of this)

• Backend - Python, FastAPI
• Data/ML - Spark, Kafka, Airflow, MongoDB, Redis, Pinecone
• MLOps - Kubeflow, MLflow
• Infra - AWS, Docker, Kubernetes; CI/CD with GitHub Actions

How We Work

• Bias for action - short specs, small PRs, daily deployments.
• Hybrid collaboration - we value focused in-person time at our Noida hub for whiteboarding and strategy, balanced with remote flexibility.
• High ownership - you'll touch the whole product, talk to customers, and influence the roadmap.

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