Back to jobs
New

Senior AI Engineer

Remote

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 USD

Benefits

  • 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.

Create a Job Alert

Interested in building your career at Optimal Dynamics? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...
Select...

If you are selected for a position, there will be a background screen, which may include checks for criminal records and/or motor vehicle reports and/or drug screening, depending on the position requirements. Job-related concerns identified during the background screening may disqualify you from the new position or your current role. Background results will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Select...

Select...

This role is open for hiring to those residing in the United States

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Optimal Dynamics’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.