AI Engineer

Role details

ABOUT FERMI Fermi is an early-stage AI tutoring startup, an initiative of Meraki Labs, dedicated to revolutionizing education globally. Our mission is to democratize world-class tutoring by making it accessible to every student through advanced AI. We are a dynamic and lean team of educators, designers, and engineers, united by a strong conviction that thoughtful design and cutting-edge AI can profoundly transform the learning experience. Led by experienced founders, including Mukesh Bansal (Founder – Myntra, CureFit, Nurix) and Peeyush Ranjan (VP-Google, CTO-Flipkart, Airbnb), we are building a product that aims to reshape how millions of students learn—turning academic challenges into accomplishments. We operate out of Bangalore, India, fostering a high-velocity environment that prioritizes impact, ownership, and direct collaboration to define and build the future of AI in education. ROLE OVERVIEW We’re hiring an AI Engineer who is a problem-solver first: someone who can ship, debug, and iterate fast. You’ll help build the core AI workflows powering our tutoring product—especially agentic tutoring systems—and harden them into production-grade, scalable, observable systems. This role is intentionally not for everyone. If you want tight scope, predictable tasks, or “only research / only backend,” this won’t fit. If you like building real systems end-to-end and seeing your work hit production quickly, you’ll love it. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Build and ship core AI workflows for our tutoring app: - agentic tutoring flows (hinting, step-by-step guidance, misconception detection) - answer evaluation / grading and feedback loops - retrieval + grounding (content ingestion, chunking, embedding, re-ranking) - personalization (student memory, progress signals, difficulty adaptation) - multimodal pipelines (images/diagrams; bonus if you’ve touched voice) - Turn prototypes into robust production systems: - latency + cost optimization (caching, batching, streaming, fallbacks) - eval-driven iteration (offline test sets, regression checks, quality gates) - observability (traces, logs, metrics, prompt/version tracking) - reliability + safety (guardrails, refusal behavior, policy/age-appropriate output) - Own features end-to-end: - from rough PRD → implementation → deployment → monitoring → iteration - Collaborate closely with product/design/education to translate learning goals into AI behavior. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR (MUST-HAVE SIGNALS) CORE ENGINEERING - 1 to 5 years of strong Python fundamentals; you can write clean code and also “hack” when needed. - Comfortable building services with FastAPI/Flask, writing APIs, and debugging production issues. - Practical understanding of Docker, local dev workflows, and basic deployment concepts. - Good CS foundations (data structures, basic systems thinking, debugging). AI ENGINEERING READINESS - Hands-on experience with at least one: - OpenAI SDK (or similar), LangChain, Haystack (or comparable LLM framework) - You understand the difference between: - prompting vs tooling vs retrieval vs agents vs evals - You’ve built something real: - internships, substantial course projects, shipped side projects, research engineering, or open-source contributions. PEDIGREE / PROOF OF WORK (WE CARE ABOUT EVIDENCE, NOT LABELS) - CS background preferred (or equivalent demonstrated capability). - Strong signal from top engineering programs in India or an equivalent track record (exceptional projects / OSS / internships that clearly show you can perform). HOW YOU WORK (THIS MATTERS) You’ll do well here if you: - default to ownership: you don’t wait to be told every step - can move fast without being sloppy - enjoy ambiguity and turn it into clear execution - treat quality as an engineering problem: tests, evals, instrumentation, iteration WHY JOIN FERMI? - Build core AI product (not demos) that students use daily. - Massive scope for learning: agents, evals, multimodal tutoring, production hardening. - Small team, high trust, direct impact—your code ships and matters. - Work with a team that cares about craft, not just hype. THIS IS NOT FOR YOU IF… - You want remote/hybrid (this is onsite Bangalore only). - You prefer narrow tickets and minimal ambiguity. - You’re not excited about production engineering (monitoring, reliability, cost, latency). - You’re mainly looking for a “research-only” role.