Staff Applied AI Engineer
Collectors Universe, Inc.2 days ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$166k - $269k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the AI opportunity and roadmap for an entire business domain, including workflow mapping, opportunity sizing, prioritization, and sequencing.
- Personally build and ship the riskiest or most technically demanding AI use cases from prototype through production, adoption, and measured impact.
- Extract reusable connectors, evaluation harnesses, workflow patterns, and other assets from successful builds.
- Define success metrics before building and report cumulative portfolio-level business value to domain leadership.
- Design agent systems with traces, evaluations, and human-in-the-loop gates that support evidence-based increases in autonomy.
- Use Claude, OpenAI, and the company’s orchestration platform as daily tools and inform platform, model, harness, and tooling decisions.
- Build production-grade application layers around agents and AI workflows, including frontend, APIs, state, latency, reliability, security, and scalability considerations.
- Review designs and code, mentor and unblock engineers, interview candidates, and raise the team’s engineering capabilities.
- Build trust with functional leaders, secure sponsorship, manage competing priorities, and communicate outcomes to executives and technical teams.
Requirements
- Proven experience owning a business domain, program, or product area and making roadmap decisions rather than only executing assigned work.
- Experience deploying agentic or AI-powered solutions to real users multiple times and in more than one context.
- Fluency with Claude, OpenAI, or similar models, plus informed practical opinions about frameworks, evaluations, orchestration, and AI tooling.
- Ability to translate strategic business problems into scoped, sequenced, working software while embedded with non-technical teams.
- Strong hands-on application engineering experience across frontend and backend systems, preferably full-stack.
- Ability to independently architect and build agent systems and make sound build-versus-reuse decisions.
- Experience building and shipping production applications with sound judgment regarding reliability, security, scalability, state, and latency.
- Track record of measuring business value and outcomes rather than focusing only on shipped features.
- Track record of improving other engineers through mentoring, reviews, reusable patterns, or tooling.
- Strong communication skills across operators, engineers, functional leaders, and executives.
- Active interest in learning and evaluating new models, tools, and techniques.
Benefits
- Remote or hybrid work may be considered, with significant value placed on in-person collaboration and possible on-site final interviews for remote candidates.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance are available to full-time employees.
- Fertility, commuter, and educational assistance benefits are available to full-time employees.
- Competitive 401(k) matching plan.
- Flexible time off for salaried employees.
- Ten company-paid holidays for regular full-time employees.
- Employee discounts on select grading services for approved submissions.
- Flexible schedules and varying shifts may be available depending on the team.
- Celebrations, holiday events, and team-building activities.
Categories
About Collectors Universe, Inc.
Collectors Universe (Collectors) provides authentication, grading, vaulting, and marketplace services for collectibles such as trading cards, coins, video games, tickets, autographs, comics, and memorabilia. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Santa Ana, California, the privately held company operates PSA and PCGS, plus PSA Vault and the Card Ladder analytics platform, and integrates with marketplaces like eBay. It earns fees for grading, storage, consignment, and data services, and has certified millions of items.