AI Engineer at Recruiting From Scratch
Sunnyvale, CA
$225,000–$300,000from the description
Jul 28, 2026
Sunnyvale, CA
Jul 29, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits within the Office of the CTO at a growth-stage automotive AI platform company, focused on building and shipping production-grade AI systems — LLM applications, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI workflows — that power software-defined vehicles used by major automotive manufacturers. The ideal candidate has a strong track record of taking AI products from prototype to production at AI-first or high-growth companies, and is comfortable influencing technical strategy at the executive level.
Senior level · 8+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 330 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 120–440
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.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $217,796 (middle half $177,469–$231,052). 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 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
The role title is plain 'AI Engineer' with no seniority modifier, but the requirements (8–15 years, Staff/Senior Staff framing, end-to-end ownership, executive collaboration) firmly support a Senior band. The posting explicitly notes 'Staff or Senior Staff Engineer preferred,' but that is framed as preferred experience, not a hard gate — Senior is the appropriate sizing band.
TensorFlow and PyTorch are listed together with 'and/or' in the technical requirements; they are treated as interchangeable alternatives on a single requirement rather than two independent hard gates.
Education is listed as 'preferred' throughout (Bachelor's/Master's/PhD, Top-30 university), so no minimum degree is hard-required.
ONNX, TensorFlow Lite, hardware optimization, edge inference, computer vision, and time-series modeling are explicitly marked 'preferred' in the posting.
The posting is from a recruiting firm (Recruiting from Scratch) placing candidates at an unnamed client company in Sunnyvale; the client's identity is not disclosed.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): ML model fine-tuning, model inference optimization, time-series modeling.
Read the full posting
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