Applied AI Engineer

Role details

About Pointer Pointer builds AI systems that do a company's hardest work and verify it, so people can finally come out of the loop. The work we take on is the foundational, multi-day, hundred-step processes that businesses run on today with entire teams of people like reconciliation across physical and digital systems, invoice and PO matching, month-end close. We believe the economy can't compound on AI until systems can run processes like these on their own, over long horizons, instead of being steered through every step. Every agent product built so far hands the last stretch back to a human, whether that's touching an elusive application or reviewing outputs. That supervision is the tax that eats the gains. We're currently working with finance and accounting teams at operationally complex enterprises, where the cost of being almost right is the same as being wrong. Our team is tight-knit, highly technical, jolly, and unusually close to the work itself. Everyone talks to customers and ships full systems end to end. We're excited by computer use, verifying AI outputs, self-improving systems, and coherence over long horizons. About the role You'll own how Pointer thinks . You'll work on everything from computer use agent reliability to self improvement to inference optimization, building systems that make Pointer more accurate and faster every week. What you’ll work on Building adaptive systems – self healing when environments change, judgment for ambiguous situations, and feedback loops that make every run smarter than the last Fine-tuning pipelines that learn from customer-specific workflows and production edge cases Latency optimization across the stack: model selection, quantization, caching, and routing strategies Designing and running experiments to push the boundaries of what agents can do reliably – coherence over long tasks, operating unfamiliar interfaces, and maintaining correctness under ambiguity You’ll be a good fit if You’re strong in Python and ML frameworks, particularly PyTorch You think in terms of evals and metrics and care about what they mean in production You’re excited by messy data and figuring out how to make it useful You have experience with RL, retrieval systems, and agents You like working across the stack: inference optimizations, data pipelines, fine-tuning, and model monitoring You've published ML papers or contributed to OSS projects What we value We think in systems and understand how things compound. What matters is not the eggs, but the goose We give people room to actually think through problems rather than rushing an outcome We're incredibly opinionated about what we build We are comfortable to share the real thing, because the best reasoning should win We run the company as a series of experiments and let the results decide what's next We let people try things and fail, because nothing good gets built by people afraid to be wrong We work hard and have fun while we do it - you can't beat someone who's enjoying the work We respect that people have responsibilities outside of work, and the boundaries that come with them What we offer Competitive pay + equity (we’ll beat all of your offers) Engaging, high-impact work Relocation support to San Francisco Visa sponsorship (if applicable) All meals covered (coffee, lunch, dinner, snacks) M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro, multiple monitors, and whatever else you need Unlimited PTO and full health coverage 401(k) for your future Regular team offsites