Afresh, the AI platform for grocery, began by tackling the most complex problem in the industry: fresh, and has evolved into the core AI platform for grocers. By leveraging proprietary AI designed for high-volatility environments, Afresh empowers partners like Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern to drive smarter decisions across their entire enterprise. Afresh has scaled to 6 enterprise-grade solutions, live in over 10% of the U.S. grocery market, and prevented over 200 million pounds of food waste last year alone.
About the Role:
As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you're part of a single team that both delivers Afresh's AI into enterprise grocery customers and builds the platform that makes that delivery fast. You'll spend dedicated time in the field, embedded with a customer, integrating into their data and shipping AI systems on top of it, and dedicated time on the platform, turning what you learned into reusable tooling the whole team deploys next. Afresh leads the customer relationship and direction; you and a small team bring the technical firepower to scope, architect, and build the work. This is senior, hands-on, 0-to-1 work in a space with no playbook.
Responsibilities:
• Partner with Afresh's account lead and the customer's technical teams to scope and architect the work - the data sources, the architecture, and the path to production
• Embed with the customer's data and engineering teams (remote and on-site); integrate into their cloud and data platform; build production-grade pipelines and model messy enterprise data into trustworthy data products
• Design and ship LLM- and agent-powered systems on that data - retrieval, agentic workflows, data-quality and analytics agents - reliable enough to run in production
• Harden what works in the field into the shared platform: the knowledge and grounding layer (knowledge graph, ontology, and retrieval), agent frameworks, and serving infrastructure
• Build the evals, tracing, and tooling that let the team measure quality (accuracy, hallucination rate, latency, cost) and ship faster on the next customer
• Build for leverage: clean interfaces and reusable building blocks, not one-off per-customer code
• Own the flywheel: field learnings flow into the platform, and platform improvements show up at the next customer
Requirements:
• 3+ years building production software and data systems, with strong, production-grade code
• An architect's instinct: ability to take an ambiguous problem and a messy data landscape and design a clean, workable solution
• Genuine AI/LLM depth - has built real systems with LLMs and agents (retrieval/RAG, tool-use) and evaluates quality rather than eyeballing it
• Real data-engineering depth: building and operating data pipelines, modeling messy enterprise data, and working in a modern cloud data platform (Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar)
• Range across both field and platform work, and the ability to switch between them without one suffering
• Customer-facing comfort: works well with a customer's engineers and data teams, running working sessions and earning trust through delivery
• A bias toward ownership and momentum, and comfort traveling to customer sites regularly (~10-20%)
• Nice to have: experience in grocery, retail, or supply chain data; knowledge graphs/ontologies/semantic layers; graph and vector stores; MCP or agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph); MLOps and observability for LLM systems
This is a hybrid role based in the San Francisco office (2 days/week onsite).
Salary Range: $156,060 - $211,140 + meaningful early-stage equity + benefits
Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with the majority of premiums covered by Afresh, plus mental health support and counseling services. Competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and a 401(k) program with company match. Home office stipend and Coworking Wallets for flexible workspace access. Annual professional development budget. Monthly stipends for wellness/lifestyle and telecommunications. Flexible paid time off.
For more information or to apply, visit the Afresh careers site. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid, 2 days/week onsite). Afresh provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment.
