AI Engineer, Post-Training & Evaluation
San Francisco, CAFull-time$150–300K/yrSeen 2 days agoStill listed 1 day ago
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At a glance
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Job overview
Coval is seeking an AI Engineer to own the model side of its conversational AI evaluation platform. The role designs and ships LLM judges for voice and chat conversations, improves them through LoRA fine-tuning and other capability work, and builds reliability tracking. The engineer will focus on measurable quality gains and help shape the engineering organization at a small Series A company.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
The role Own the models behind Coval’s judges. Coval is the evaluation platform for conversational AI: we help enterprise teams simulate, monitor and improve voice and chat agents before those agents ever reach a customer. Because our product is the judge, this role sits at the center of the company. You’ll own the model side end to end. You’ll design and ship the LLM-as-a-judge evaluations that score voice and chat conversations at scale, then sharpen them with LoRA fine-tunes on open-weight models and non-tuning work like tool use and context engineering. Your improvements ship directly into the product enterprises rely on to launch dependable voice agents. What you’ll do
- Design and ship the LLM judges that score conversations: rubrics, judge prompting, and calibration against human raters
- Build the reliability tracking that keeps judges honest from release to release
- Run post-training where training beats prompting: LoRA adapters on open-weight models, trained on data distilled from our own scored conversations
- Everywhere else, do the non-tuning capability work: tool use, structured outputs, and context engineering
- Keep asking which lever actually moves the metric, and focus there
What we’re looking for
- 4+ years as an engineer, with strong systems instincts
- A track record of shipping measurable quality gains by pairing rigorous measurement with targeted training, not vibes and prompt tweaks
- You’ve built eval infrastructure you actually trust
- You’ve run LoRA/SFT experiments end to end, including preparing your own data rather than relying on clean data from other teams, so you know which lever really wins
- High agency: on a small Series A team, nobody hands you tickets. You figure out what matters next and drive it there
- Ambitious and kind. You’ll be part of the group that founds our engineering org, sets its bar and grows the team
How this job compares
Set against the 7,217 open AI Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted October 29, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$150–300K/yr
- California median$155–257K/yr1,167 salary ranges
- US median$133–241K/yr6,023 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $225K, is 9% above the California median midpoint ($207K) — in the middle half of AI Engineer salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 1,427 open AI Engineer jobs in California and 7,217 across the US. 8% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Hiring the most in California
- Deloitte191 open
- Accenture102 open
- Capital One60 open
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 3 years of experience; AI Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (6,215 postings).
- Education
- 3,327 of the 7,217 open AI Engineer jobs (46%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on October 29, 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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