# AI Engineer, Back-end - Company: [Taste Labs]() - Location: San Francisco - Team: Technical Staff - Employment type: Full Time - Salary: $175K – $275K - Posted: February 20, 2026 ## Job description **About the company** Taste Labs is building the data and infrastructure layer for taste. Our goal is to end AI slop. To make AI feel right, not just be correct. We raised $18.5M in seed co-led by Amplify and CRV, and most frontier labs are already customers. AI has nailed objective domains and can generate anything. The hard part left is judgement: what fits, what feels like you, what's actually GREAT. We're turning that into something measurable, starting with design. We do it on two sides: building the post-training data and RL environments that teach taste to frontier models, and the context and verification tools agents need to produce work that's more creative, more on-brand, more right. If that problem excites you, you'll like it here! **About the role** You'll build the AI systems that power taste agent harnesses, memory, evals, tooling, data collection, index, search, graph, crawling, scraping, security and more. **Types of problems you’d work on** * Craft agent harnesses, memory and self-improvement loops * Design evaluation pipelines and synthetic data generation * Create embedding and retrieval infrastructure that scales to millions of requests * Build crawling and scraping systems for visual data across the web * Set up inference serving and APIs for client-facing products * Manage security sweeps vulnerability mapping * Develop the tooling and infrastructure that makes everything reliable and fast **What matters to us** * Deeply technical: you’re deeply opinionated about what good code means, you have an AI-forward setup while being anti-slop, you care deeply about the craft. * You’re creative and have genuine curiosity about ‘taste’ and making subjective domains verifiable * You have startup DNA: you move fast, adapt, no such thing as ‘not in scope’, you like ambiguous, hard problems * AI experience: you need experience building AI forward products, systems, agents, models and more. * You care about arriving at the simple, clear solution vs. the complex one **Bonus points** * Open source contributions or personal projects that show you build things because you're curious * Background at creative companies (Figma, Notion, Canva, Adobe, Runway, etc.) or companies with strong index building/crawling (e.g. Firecrawl, Brave, Luma, Pika) or data (Mercor, Surge, etc.) ## Apply [Apply on Taste Labs]() Canonical job page: