Senior AI Engineer

About Our Company Built on over four decades of pioneering research at Princeton University, our platform represents the leading edge of innovation in freight and transportation planning. We help customers unlock double-digit revenue gains and drive smarter, data-driven operations at scale.With the recent close of our Series C funding round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, we’re entering an exciting new phase of growth. Today, Optimal Dynamics is a high-growth company of ~70 employees, backed by top-tier investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, The Westly Group, Activate Capital, and Koch.  We're on a mission to redefine the way logistics decisions are made—and we’re just getting started. About Our Team We are a team of bright, kind, and solution-oriented people focused on creating value for our customers. We can solve problems individually, but understand that the best solutions are found when the team brainstorms ideas together. We are excited about balancing the need to deploy new solutions quickly and designing solutions that are secured, reliable, maintainable, and scalable for the long run.About The Role We’re looking for a Senior AI Engineer to lead the 0→1 buildout and 1→n scaling of AI capabilities at Optimal Dynamics. You’ll set direction, establish engineering standards, and deliver production systems that ground AI outputs in trustworthy company and customer data. This is a hands-on role with broad ownership where you’ll make key architecture and tooling choices and evolve them as we learn. Key Responsibilities: Own RAG initiatives end-to-end from problem framing and data readiness through prototyping, iteration, and production launch. Establish foundational components and practices for document processing, indexing, retrieval, orchestration, and evaluation; selecting tools and approaches that balance quality, cost, and speed. Build reliable services and APIs that are observable, secure, and designed for scale in a cloud environment. Define success metrics (quality, latency, cost, safety) and drive continuous improvement via experimentation and data-driven decisions. Create durable team assets (i.e. playbooks, test harnesses, checklists, and documentation) to make RAG development repeatable across products. Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data/ML, Engineering, and GTM to translate ambiguous needs into shippable capabilities with clear business impact. Mentor teammates and contribute to a strong engineering culture around AI systems and responsible deployment. Who You Are Experienced: a Senior, hands-on engineer who can take a fuzzy problem from discovery to reliable production outcomes. Pragmatic: You balance quality, cost, speed, and risk to ship value iteratively. Innovative: Comfortable choosing and evolving the stack as needs change; you create guardrails and standards along the way. Communicative: You have the ability to align stakeholders and translate complex technical ideas into clear decisions. Operational Owner: You care about reliability, observability, and measurable impact on customers and the business. Key Qualifications 4+ years of proven industry experience building and operating backend, platform, or data services at production scale  Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Operations Research, or Mathematics/Physics Proven track record delivering data or ML-powered features end-to-end (Discovery/Prototyping > Launch > Iteration). Python Proficiency - you write well-tested & maintainable code. API design expertise and experience with cloud services (preferably AWS) Familiarity with information retrieval concepts and grounding AI systems in trustworthy data. Comfort setting technical direction, selecting tools, and establishing engineering best practices for AI-focused builds.  Nice to Have (Bonus Points) Experience introducing retrieval-augmented or knowledge-grounded AI capabilities in a product or platform context. Exposure to evaluation methodologies for AI systems (quality, latency, cost, safety) and running experiments/A-B tests. Background working with unstructured data pipelines, indexing, and search, whether homegrown or via managed services. Experience mentoring engineers, uplifting practices, and creating reusable playbooks and templates. Experience in the transportation, logistics, or broader supply chain industry. Customer-facing collaboration comfort: gathering requirements, scoping MVPs, and measuring ROI post-launch. Why Join Us At Optimal Dynamics, you’ll work with a world-class AI team and industry experts to tackle some of the most complex and impactful challenges in logistics. You’ll have the opportunity to shape a greenfield capability from the ground up—setting strategy, architecture, and standards while seeing your work directly power decisions for leading logistics companies. You’ll thrive in a pragmatic, collaborative culture with tight feedback loops, the autonomy to choose the right tools, and the support to make bold ideas a reality. Along the way, you’ll partner with experienced engineers, data and ML practitioners, and industry experts. If you’re passionate about building AI products that solve real-world problems, we’d love to hear from you.Pay Range$170,000—$200,000 USDBenefits Competitive compensation, including Series C level equity Health / Dental / Vision 100% covered for employee and 50% for dependents Life Insurance, with optional supplemental insurance Flexible Spending Account (FSA) Health Spending Account (HSA) 401(k) with match Unlimited PTO (vacation, personal days, sick days, jury duty, military leave, bereavement) 11 Holidays Paid Parental Leave for all employees Short-term and Long-term Disability Insurances, and AD&D Insurance Fitness membership reimbursement Commuter benefits Optimal Dynamics is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive workplace with equal opportunity for all applicants and employees. Our goal is to recruit the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool regardless of race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex (including pregnancy), age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.Optimal Dynamics is committed to working with and providing access and reasonable accommodation to applicants. If you require an accommodation, please reach out to careers@optimaldynamics.com once you've begun the interview process. All requests for accommodations are treated discreetly and confidentially, as practical and permitted by law.