Senior AI Engineer

Durham, NC

Full Time

Experienced

Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certifications. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. Professional certification exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.

The engineering team at Pocket Prep works alongside the product and design teams to develop the technical backbone of our applications. As the stewards of our codebases, engineering team members focus on their craft to provide high-quality, resilient, and accessible products that help studiers of all walks of life achieve their goals. We strive to continuously improve our processes, coding standards, and patterns both as individual engineers and as a team to ensure that we’re always ready for the next challenge.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to contribute to our research and development efforts in artificial intelligence. As a key member of our team, you will identify emerging technologies, build and refine proof-of-concepts, and scale innovative solutions for production. You will work on diverse projects—ranging from book reference generation and keyword engines to exam readiness predictors—utilizing both traditional machine learning techniques and cutting-edge large language models (LLMs).

What You Will Do

Innovate & Research: Continuously explore new AI/ML technologies and methodologies to drive product innovation.
Prototype & Scale: Develop rapid prototypes and proof-of-concepts, then refine them into robust, production-ready solutions.
Collaborate: Work closely with product managers and the engineering team to translate business challenges into technical opportunities.
Integration: Connect disparate software systems, ensuring seamless integration of AI solutions across our products.
Maintain Excellence: Establish and iterate on best practices, code style guidelines, and quality standards within the engineering team.
Monitor & Optimize: Continuously evaluate model performance and iterate on solutions to maintain state-of-the-art results.

About You

We’re seeking an experienced engineer with a passion for AI/ML and a proven track record of solving complex problems. You are not only adept at rapid prototyping but also excel at building scalable, production-level solutions.

Required:

4+ years of hands-on machine learning experience, including foundational ML models (e.g., random forests, neural networks), modern deep learning architectures, and ML/AI pipelines (e.g., embedding generation, RAG, and reranking methods).
Direct experience working with the latest large language models via APIs, going beyond prompt engineering to integrate deep AI insights into applications.
A proactive, curious mindset with a passion for keeping up with the rapidly evolving AI/ML landscape.

Experience delivering solutions in multiple programming languages and technology stacks.
Involvement in projects from ideation and inception through to release and ongoing maintenance.

And exhibits the following qualities:

An experimental mindset - understanding the Pareto rule and how to quickly assess the feasibility of a project with the appropriate level of effort
A desire to collaborate with the team, knowledge share, mentor, and work together to find optimal solutions
Humility when working with other team members, and willingness to accept outside feedback and ideas
Comfortable being nimble and experimental throughout the course of product development; recognizing tradeoffs, making decisions, and sharing the impact with stakeholders

You are also excited about our culture:

Embrace a spirit of improvement and welcome feedback
Choose curiosity instead of judgment
Share your opinions and perspectives, and kindly disagree when you see things differently
Craft is important to you; MVPs don’t need polish but they shouldn’t be duct tape and bailing wire
Love for continued learning individually and as a team, as well as making education more accessible for others

Benefits

Pocket Prep is a leading mobile and web-based learning platform offering efficient and affordable study solutions for professional certification and licensure. We believe that education should be within everyone’s reach. High-stakes exams are often a stressful and expensive barrier to career advancement - Pocket Prep strives to prepare our members to pass with confidence.

We care about people passing exams because we’ve been there. Co-founders Ken Gillette and Peter Murphy faced expensive, high-stakes tests for career-promoting professional credentials while they were co-workers at Lockheed Martin. Like tens of thousands of other Americans, they shelled out hundreds of dollars to register and buy the materials they thought would improve their chances of passing. After hauling textbooks, flashcards, and study guides to costly test prep classes, they founded Pocket Prep in 2011 to help people more effectively and inexpensively prepare for important assessments.

Some of our employee benefits include:

Stability: We're 10+ years old, 100% profitable without investor backing, and we continue to have year-over-year growth.
Work/Life Balance: Freedom to live your life while accomplishing something awesome for everyone in education. Flexible PTO and a 3-week company-wide holiday break from mid-December through New Year.
Competitive Compensation: Generous profit-sharing program and base pay. This role will pay $140,000 - $155,000 based on experience and location.
100% Healthcare: We cover all of our employees' healthcare premiums because we are invested in your well-being. We also cover 80% of dependents.
Remote Flexibility: You can work where and when you are most effective. We have an office in downtown Durham, North Carolina and are supportive of remote work options.
Give Back: We are active participants in our communities through volunteer partnerships with local nonprofits. We offer VTO (volunteer time off) for independent engagement with your community.

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1. Build Team Trust: Assume positive intent. Trust that everyone is doing their best. Talk directly and respectfully with your colleagues. Demonstrate humility and be kind to all stakeholders.

2. Grow Together: Make decisions that support positive growth. Collaborate and move forward with purpose as a team. Exhibit humility and grace in the face of change. Put the goals of the business ahead of individual priorities.

3. Embrace the Experimental Mindset: Learn from each other and our members. See curiosity as the path to discovery, learning, and discernment. Continuously innovate and iterate. Work swiftly with focus on the fewest, most important things.

4. Contribute your Expertise: Exercise the autonomy you have to structure your work most effectively. Make efforts to grow in your field, and use available resources to succeed in your role. Share your knowledge.

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There are a lot of ‘obvious’ uses of AI for our business such as generation of content, custom tutors and member journey analysis to name a few. While we have ongoing research in those areas, we have also found quite a few less trendy yet very impactful applications. What is an interesting ML / AI tool that you have experience with that you could see being helpful to our members or internal business operations?*

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