Applied AI Engineer

Serval

Serval

Software Engineering, Data Science
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Nov 14, 2025

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

Who We Are

At Serval, we're building the AI platform for IT teams. Our goal is to take on legacy players like ServiceNow, a $230+ bn company, by building the platform for AI agents to resolve IT issues instead of humans.

Serval “automates the automation,” using a natural language-to-code workflow builder and AI agents that discover and deliver automations for tedious IT workflows.

Our mission is to free IT departments from the #helpdesk channel by creating the simplest way to automate employee onboarding/offboarding, software access management, and the long tail of employee requests. Long term, our vision extends to developing a universal workflow automation platform for all business functions.

Serval was founded by product and engineering leaders from Verkada and is backed by industry-leading investors like First Round, General Catalyst, Alt Capital, and Box Group.

Role Overview

As an Applied AI Engineer at Serval, you’ll help build the intelligence behind our platform - the foundational AI agents that reason, act, and automate complex IT workflows. Your work will apply cutting-edge models and techniques in creative, real-world ways to convert repetitive IT processes into intelligent automation.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and deploy AI-powered features from the ground up.

  • Develop and optimize Serval’s applied AI systems — from model selection and fine-tuning to inference and evaluation pipelines.

  • Integrate AI capabilities into production environments, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance.

  • Collaborate across engineering and product to bring new customer experiences to life.

  • Continuously evaluate model performance and improve results based on data and user feedback.

  • Help establish AI engineering best practices and raise the technical bar across the team.

Requirements

  • Experience as a software engineer or machine learning engineer with a focus on applied AI.

  • Proven experience developing and deploying production-grade AI systems, ideally leveraging large language models or foundation models.

  • Experience with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or evaluation techniques for LLMs.

  • Comfort working with APIs, data pipelines, and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or similar).

  • Deep appreciation for delivering high-quality user experiences, not just high-performing models.

  • Excellent communication skills and ability to thrive in a fast-paced, collaborative startup environment.

  • Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Nice to Have

  • Experience building AI-native applications or tools that use LLMs in production.

  • Familiarity with our stack: Go, gRPC, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes, AWS, and Terraform.

  • Early-stage startup experience or a track record of zero-to-one product development.

  • Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, or orchestration frameworks.

What We Offer

  • Impact: Be a key player in shaping the success of our product and company.

  • Growth: Build a fundamentally new AI product offering with the support of our experienced team and investors. Grow rapidly with the company.

  • Culture: Join a culture that values innovation, ownership, accountability, and fun.

  • Compensation: Competitive salary, equity and benefits.