AI Engineer

Papaya Global is a rapidly growing, award-winning B2B tech unicorn with an ambitious mission to revolutionize the payroll & payments industry. With over $400M raised from multiple tier-one investors, our innovative technology provides a comprehensive solution for managing global workforces, encompassing everything from hiring and onboarding to managing and paying employees in over 160 countries.

At Papaya, we apply AI to complex payroll and payments challenges. This isn’t research for research’s sake; we build tools our users and partners rely on every day.

We’re hiring an AI Engineer for our AI Core team to build and scale AI across Papaya’s products and workflows, from agentic document understanding to multi-agent systems and ML solutions. This is a hands-on, cross-functional role where you’ll prototype quickly, build robust evaluations, and ship production-grade AI with measurable business impact.

What you’ll do

• Build and ship AI/ML solutions using LLMs, agents, retrieval patterns (RAG), and document understanding models, alongside classic ML (classification, ranking, time-series).
• Prototype and iterate quickly: turn ideas into high-quality POCs, validate feasibility, and evolve them toward production.
• Shape technical direction and evaluate models and approaches using clear benchmarks, metrics, and real-world impact measurement.
• Research and apply emerging techniques, e.g., multimodal/document AI, agentic frameworks, synthetic data generation, and architectural approaches.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and domain experts to identify opportunities and deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Help shape scalable, secure architecture and best practices for AI delivery.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in AI/ML engineering, or data science with strong engineering ownership.
• Strong Python and solid software fundamentals with clean, well-tested, production-quality code.
• Hands-on experience with GenAI/LLMs: prompt design, embeddings, fine-tuning and RAG patterns; experience building agents is a strong advantage.
• Experience with core ML; NLP/CV/multimodal experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with modern AI toolkits (e.g., LangChain, Hugging Face, PyTorch).
• Cloud experience (AWS/GCP/Azure) and working with scalable data pipelines.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• BS/MS/PhD degree in CS/Data Science/Engineering (MS/PhD a plus)