Software Engineer, Applied AI
New York City, NYFull-time$175–290K/yrPosted 7mo agoStill listed 6 days ago
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At a glance
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Job overview
Auctor is building an AI layer for professional services and software implementation. The Software Engineer, Applied AI will design, build, and improve production agent systems across retrieval, document understanding, tool use, context management, prompting, and orchestration. The role combines engineering with empirical research, including evaluating agent quality through production traces, experiments, and real enterprise tasks. It is based in New York, NY, in person five days per week.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Full job description
Why Auctor Auctor is building the AI layer for professional services and software implementation. Think of us as the brain behind the best solution engineers, forward-deployed engineers, and onboarding teams—automating the documentation, the discovery, and the decision-making that powers $400B+ in services work. We're going after one of the biggest software categories of the decade.
The Opportunity As a Software Engineer, Applied AI at Auctor, you will design, build, and improve the core systems behind our agents in production. This role sits at the boundary of engineering and empirical research. You will work across retrieval, document understanding, tool use, context management, prompting, and orchestration. Some weeks you will be shipping new capabilities. Some weeks you will be mining production traces, designing evals, and figuring out which part of the system is actually failing. We are not looking for someone to glue an API onto a product and call it AI. We are looking for someone who wants to build real agent systems, understand how they behave in the wild, and use that understanding to make bold product and architecture decisions. This role is based in New York, NY, in person 5 days per week.
What You'll Build
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Build and improve the core systems behind our agents across retrieval, tool use, document understanding, memory, and orchestration
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Design evals and experiments that help us understand agent quality in production
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Turn traces, failures, and user behavior into concrete product and architecture decisions
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Work closely with operations, GTM, and deployed teams to understand real workflows and where agents break down
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Evaluate models, prompts, and system designs across real enterprise tasks
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Own the loop from idea -> implementation -> measurement -> iteration
What You Bring
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Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to ship production systems
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Fluency in Python
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Experience building or working on LLM-powered products, agent systems, or adjacent applied AI systems
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An empirical mindset — you reach for logs, traces, experiments, and real usage before guessing
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Strong systems taste — you understand that retrieval, prompting, memory, tools, and UX interact
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High ownership and comfort working in ambiguity
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Strong opinions about what makes agent systems actually work
How this job compares
Set against the 40,501 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 2, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$175–290K/yr
- New York median$158–225K/yr2,352 salary ranges
- US median$135–217K/yr32,212 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $233K, is 19% above the New York median midpoint ($195K) — in the top quarter of Software Engineer salary ranges in New York.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 3,029 open Software Engineer jobs in New York and 40,501 across the US. 7% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 3 to 7 years (32,858 postings).
- Education
- 14,142 of the 40,501 open Software Engineer jobs (35%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 2, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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