AI Engineer

Pay: $180,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year

Job description:

Founding AI/Full-Stack Engineer (Hands on IC)

Location: San Francisco, CA (In Office)
Compensation: $180K–$200K + future leadership/growth path

Type: Full-Time | IC

About Abby Connect

Abby Connect is a fast-growing customer experience company helping small businesses deliver personal, professional, and scalable communication. Our live receptionist services have powered thousands of client interactions every day for over a decade, and we’re now expanding our technology portfolio with AI-driven products that combine human empathy with intelligent automation.

The AI Receptionist Platform is Abby Connect’s latest innovation — an intelligent voice system that manages scheduling, intake, and communication in natural conversation. It’s a critical part of our long-term strategy to redefine how businesses handle customer calls.

The Role

We’re hiring an internal AI/full-stack engineer to take ownership of the AI Receptionist platform.
This is a high-impact, hands-on engineering role, not a management or architecture-only position.

You will:

• Build, optimize, and extend our LLM-powered voice receptionist
• Own architecture and implementation across backend, AI/RAG pipelines, and integrations
• Partner directly with the CEO on strategy and execution
• Review, enforce, and raise engineering quality across our outsourced team
• Ship production-grade features quickly with strong reliability and observability
• Eventually grow into a leadership role — after you’ve built the foundation

What You’ll Do

AI / LLM Engineering

• Own RAG, vector search, retrieval quality, hallucination mitigation, and evaluation pipelines
• Integrate LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) with tools, memory, and business logic
• Build agent workflows and voice orchestration
• Optimize latency, cost, and accuracy at scale

Backend & Full-Stack Engineering

• Build and maintain modern, production-grade microservices
• Work primarily in TypeScript, Python, and React
• Improve observability, logging, monitoring, CI/CD, and test automation
• Make heavy use of queues, caching, async pipelines, and distributed systems patterns

Voice AI / Telephony

• Integrate STT/TTS (ElevenLabs, Whisper, etc.)
• Work with telephony partners (Twilio, SIP, WebRTC)

Cross-Functional & Leadership

• Work directly with the CEO & Product Manager
• Collaborate with operations, voice partners, and support teams
• Review and guide our outsourced engineering vendor (Scopic)
• Be the technical owner until future hires join

Who We're Looking For:

Required

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering (not architectural-only)
• Strong backend engineering foundation (TypeScript or Python)
• Proven experience in at least 2 of the following:
• RAG pipelines (FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma)
• LLM agent workflows (LangChain, CrewAI, custom)
• Vector DB design, chunking, embedding pipelines
• LLM integration & evaluation
• Experience shipping production systems (ideally v1 builds)
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment
• Strong debugging, code-review, and architecture instincts

Bonus, but very valuable

• Voice AI (ElevenLabs, Whisper, Tymeshift, Twilio Voice, SIP, WebRTC)
• Realtime or event-driven systems
• Experience at an early-stage startup
• Experience managing or improving outsourced engineering teams

This might not be for you if:

• Pure “Principal Architect,” “Lead,” or “Manager” roles with little day-to-day coding
• Anyone who hasn’t built RAG or agent systems
• Enterprise-only engineers with no startup/v1 experience
• You prefer strategy/leadership over coding

Why Join Abby Connect

• Impact: You’ll play a key role in the next phase of Abby Connect’s growth — driving the technology behind a product already in market.
• Stability + Innovation: We’re profitable, established, and expanding into new AI-driven lines of business.
• Ownership: Influence architectural decisions and shape how we scale our technology and team.
• Mission: We believe the future of customer service combines human understanding with AI precision.
• Collaboration: Work closely with executive leadership to bridge product, AI, and operations.

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive SF-based salary: $180K–$200K
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid holidays + flexible PTO
• Growth path into future engineering leadership

Abby Connect’s Values

• Human first: We build technology that amplifies human connection.
• Own the outcome: We take initiative, not orders.
• Learn fast: We test, iterate, and adapt.
• Collaborate openly: Everyone has a voice in shaping the product and company

Job Type: Full-time

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Dental insurance
• Employee assistance program
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Referral program
• Retirement plan
• Vision insurance

Application Question(s):

• Are you located in San Francisco or within commutable distance? This is an in person role in our San Francisco office.
• Can you describe a recent project where you personally built and shipped an AI/LLM feature (e.g., RAG pipeline, agent workflow, LLM-integrated API)?
• Are you comfortable writing production-level code daily in either TypeScript or Python?
• Have you directly implemented vector search or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using tools like Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Qdrant, or a similar vector DB?
• Do you have experience working in a fast-paced startup or small engineering team where you owned features end-to-end (architecture → code → testing → deployment)?

Work Location: In person