Senior Applied AI Engineer at Inversion
Playa Vista, CA
$139,000–$201,000from the description
Jul 10, 2026
Playa Vista, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A first-of-its-kind AI engineering role focused on building and owning the company's internal AI tooling from scratch. The work centers on designing and deploying agent-based systems, retrieval-augmented pipelines, and LLM-powered workflows that help internal teams operate more efficiently — starting with software engineering use cases and expanding company-wide. Suited to engineers with hands-on production experience shipping applied AI systems who are comfortable defining scope in ambiguous environments.
Senior level · 5+ years · Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 600 people in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 250–900
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $164,459 (middle half $130,334–$195,752). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The role sits at the intersection of applied AI engineering and software development; 15-1252 (Software Developers) was chosen as primary because the JD emphasizes building and shipping production software systems end-to-end, with 15-2051 (Data Scientists) as a runner-up given the model experimentation and evaluation work.
ITAR compliance is required — candidates must be US citizens, lawful permanent residents, or protected individuals as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). No formal security clearance is gated, but this effectively restricts the eligible candidate pool.
No degree requirement is stated anywhere in the posting.
'Backend development' and 'REST APIs' are inferred as hard gates from the required qualifications section ('Experience developing backend systems, APIs, internal tools, or automation frameworks'); no specific framework or language is named for the backend.
TypeScript/JavaScript appears only under Desired Qualifications and is explicitly framed as a familiarity/nice-to-have.
Fine-tuning and retrieval/search systems design appear under Desired Qualifications and are treated as preferred accordingly.
The role is on-site in Playa Vista, CA (Los Angeles metro); the posting explicitly states in-office presence is required.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): backend development.
Read the full posting
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