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. 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 decide what systems and infrastructure we use. The team provides high ownership with the opportunity to experiment, prototype and then ship to production. 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 seen in browsers.

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

• Fine‑tune LLMs and embedding models for recruiting queries; test new providers as they launch; build systems to evaluate what improves search quality.
• Make semantic search instant across 800M+ profiles; integrate rerankers to surface better candidates; design feedback loops that help search get smarter.
• Own data infrastructure pipelines in Snowflake; clean and structure candidate data; build systems that allow rapid experimentation without breaking production.
• Ship full‑stack features from prompt engineering to UI; create interfaces that make complex search feel simple; iterate based on recruiter feedback.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of industry experience as a software engineer building user‑facing products.
• Experience mentoring, working cross‑functionally, and working directly with customers.
• The ability to move with velocity and invest in improving your craft.
• A focus on technical quality and building reliable, scalable systems.
• A product‑oriented mindset that makes decisions decisively.
• Energized by collaborating in‑office in a hybrid model.

Extra Credit

• Built agents or worked on evaluation infrastructure.
• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or search systems like Elasticsearch.
• Worked with RAG architectures or ML observability.
• Worked at an early‑stage startup where self‑direction was essential.
• 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 such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

How We Work

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

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

Benefits

• 10‑year stock option exercise window.
• Flexible Time Off and 16 paid holidays (including company wellness days).
• Best‑in‑class medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• $1,200 annual learning and development stipend.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for all parents, plus $1,500 new‑parent perk and flexible return‑to‑work options.

Role Details

• Location: this role is based 3 days per week out of our San Francisco HQ and is not eligible for full‑time remote work.
• Compensation: annual cash compensation range $190,000–$260,000 based on level in addition to equity and benefits.

The range displayed on this job posting reflects the minimum and maximum compensation. Factors including location, level, job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience will determine compensation.

We may provide immigration and sponsorship support to new employees based on unique circumstances.

This role offers the chance to work on a small, world‑class team with former Meta, Uber, and Dropbox engineers, 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement: We uphold a commitment to non‑discrimination based on any protected group status specified in applicable laws.