Senior 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.

We're building AI to tackle one of the hardest operational challenges in business: getting workforce management right across many markets, each with its own tax rules, labor laws, payment rails, and constantly shifting policies.

In this role on our AI team, you'll build and scale core AI systems that power Papaya's products. You'll work across agentic document intelligence, autonomous agents, compliance AI, and ML-powered insights, prototyping quickly, building robust evaluations, and shipping production-grade AI with real business impact.

What You'll Do

Build and ship AI/ML solutions using LLMs, agents, RAG, and document understanding models, alongside classic ML
Prototype quickly, validate feasibility, and turn strong POCs into production systems
Evaluate models and architectures, apply testing and guardrails to improve agent and service reliability
Research and apply emerging techniques: multimodal/document AI, agentic frameworks, synthetic data generation, and new architectural approaches
Work cross-functionally with product, R&D, and compliance teams to deliver end-to-end solutions
Contribute to scalable, secure architecture and engineering best practices for AI delivery

Requirements:

5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or applied data science with production engineering responsibilities
Strong Python skills and solid software fundamentals
Experience building production LLM-powered systems, including prompt design, embeddings, fine-tuning, RAG; agent experience is a plus
Solid ML foundations; NLP, document AI, or multimodal experience is a plus
Hands-on experience with modern AI tooling (Hugging Face, PyTorch, LangChain, LangGraph) and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
Strong communication and collaboration skills; comfortable working cross-functionally with product and domain teams
BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or Engineering (MS/PhD a plus)