Founding Applied AI Engineer - ottobooks at Pear VC

Applied AI Engineer (Founding Engineer)

About Us

70% of an accountant's time is spent on basic, repetitive tasks. Imagine spending nearly 6 hours of your day sorting thousands of puzzle pieces by color and edge to finally reveal the big picture, only to have them all mixed up again the next morning and having to start over. Again and again. Forever.

At ottobooks, our mission is to transform the accounting industry with AI native software that automates routine tasks, freeing accountants to focus on what really matters. Our company is led by founders who have a combination of deep domain expertise and technical experience. We are proud to be backed by a top tier seed firm and to have design partners who are deeply invested in our mission.

A big space needs big ideas, and we are looking for our first full time hire / founding AI Engineer to help bring these ideas to life. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a company that will redefine an industry.

About You

• You are obsessed with the latest technologies and are the first to experiment with new releases or understand the latest research.
• You are a systems thinker who can see beyond the next few moves and design for the future.
• You are outcome focused and choose methods and approaches with the end goal in mind. Metrics and measurement drive your behavior.
• You thrive in ambiguity, experimentation, and continuous learning.
• You have a strong sense of integrity and are committed to doing the right thing.

About the Role

As our founding AI engineer, you will own and help build our AI practice to tackle questions such as: How do you create a system that completes tasks in seconds rather than hours? How do you scale that system to solve not just one problem, but a multitude of challenges? How do you deploy these solutions in a way that hides the complexity from users, making the experience feel magical?

In this role you'll collaborate with the founders and design partners to transform recent breakthroughs into practical solutions for the accounting industry by evaluating, building and applying AI to the products we ship. Your key focus areas include OCR, Document Understanding, Named Entity Recognition, and NLP.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with founders and design partners to help build our platform to make it easier to ship AI solutions in the areas we operate in.
• Evaluate open source, proprietary models to setup best in practice solutions to everyday problems in accounting
• Identify and collect metrics to measure and improve the efficacy of models in production
• Partner with engineers to build effective data pipelines to finetune models, collect user feedback and monitor metrics

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience building AI products, preferably, with a focus in NLP
• 5+ years of programming and software engineering (meaningful academic work will also count), preferably in Python
• Experience maintaining models in production and strong experience in metrics and measurement.