Applied AI Engineer
US$200,000 – US$240,000 / yr base salary
Posted 19 Aug 2026
Advertised as “Senior Applied AI Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Hybrid
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$200,000 – US$240,000 / yr |
|---|
About Qualitate
Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis - replacing weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output.
Expert research is a broken industry dominated by legacy incumbents with expensive, manual, and slow services. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling expert calls, and synthesizing insights across fragmented providers. The process takes weeks to produce short-lived intelligence.
Qualitate transforms this workflow by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI. Qualitate’s AI Moderator interviews thousands of experts simultaneously each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. The platform turns these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language. Our customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms.
The Role
We’re looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to help build the LLM and retrieval systems at the core of our AI Moderator - the engine that conducts thousands of real-time expert interviews and turns them into structured, queryable intelligence. You’ll work at the intersection of applied research and production engineering: designing agentic pipelines, scaling retrieval over proprietary data, and shipping systems that directly power what our customers see. This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small founding team - your architecture decisions and code will define how the product scales.
The day-to-day:
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Own the LLM orchestration layer that drives our AI Moderator’s real-time, multi-turn expert interviews, from prompt and context design to model routing and latency optimization.
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Instrument evals, monitoring, and guardrails for AI systems running in production, so quality issues surface before customers see them.
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Build production APIs and services that turn raw interview data into novel, structured, queryable insights for customers, in partnership with product and data engineering.
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Work cross-functionally with our research team to build and ship AI-powered research assets that are surfaced to customers.