Applied AI Engineer

David Joseph & Company is building a real-time advertising system where AI generates personalized creative and improves from performance data at scale. In this applied role, you will take ownership of the engine behind playable and short-form video ads, connect generation to recommendations, and help define the architecture as the platform evolves.

This is a full-time position based in San Francisco, CA (in-person) with a salary range of USD 200,000 to 250,000 per year plus equity. The role is open to candidates with 4+ years of relevant experience.

What you will do

• Own the real-time personalized ad engine that uses agents to generate playable mini-games, short-form video, and in-between creative variants on the fly, then learns from performance across millions of daily interactions and millions in annualized ad spend.
• Define the architecture approach since it is not yet established, helping shape how the system should be structured for production needs.
• Build playable generation agents that transform an advertiser or app brief into a working, on-brand HTML5 playable ad.
• Implement automated QA checks to detect broken playable builds before they reach a human.
• Develop video generation pipelines using multimodal pipelines to produce short-form video ads and variants across formats, hooks, and styles with frontier image and video models.
• Connect generation to the recommendation and ranking engine so each user receives creative tailored to them, using engagement, CTR, installs, and ROAS to determine what wins and to continuously improve relevance.
• Provide production-grade agent infrastructure, including orchestration, evals, and reliability to ensure the system runs at scale, not only as a demo.

What you bring

• Strong applied AI experience, including building and shipping an LLM, multimodal, or agentic system in production beyond simple API wrappers.
• Backend depth end-to-end across infrastructure, data, and serving, including experience with GCP, Redis, MongoDB, and Temporal.
• Comfort working with ambiguity, particularly because the architecture is still being defined.
• A bias toward shipping, suited to an early-stage environment that moves quickly and iterates.

Technologies you may work with

• GCP, Redis, MongoDB, Temporal
• Swift, Kotlin, React, React Native
• HTML5
• App Store, Google Play

Role context and what is already live

• A recommendation stack already serves ads across millions of daily interactions, reaching tens of millions of users with millions of dollars in annualized ad spend.
• Dozens of AI-generated playable mini-game and video ads run in production inside major AI apps, built using the company’s playable engine and editor.
• A proprietary ad SDK built with Swift, Kotlin, React, and React Native is live in top App Store and Google Play apps.

Benefits

• Equity
• Ownership with a direct line to what ships

Key details

• Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)
• Employment: Full-time
• Experience: 4+ years
• Compensation: $200,000 – $250,000 USD per year, plus equity
• Visa sponsorship: Not available

Interview process

• Interview with the CTO
• Take-home assignment
• Work trial
• Offer