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.

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.