Senior AI Engineer, AI Labs
Designer Fund is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech companies using design to improve health, sustainability, or prosperity for people. It backs founding teams, particularly those with design backgrounds, across sectors like fintech, healthcare, climate tech, and developer tools.
About Designer Fund
Designer Fund is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in tech companies leveraging design to drive positive outcomes in health, sustainability, and financial prosperity. Its portfolio spans a wide range of sectors including financial infrastructure (Stripe), preventative health (Omada), collaborative tools (Notion), developer tools (Netlify), product management (Linear), payroll and benefits (Gusto), design tools (Framer), and healthcare infrastructure (Commure), among dozens of other companies across fintech, climate tech, healthcare, EdTech, and AI. The firm also runs 'Designer Founders,' a community and platform highlighting designers who have gone on to found and lead companies, reflecting its focus on backing design-driven founders and design-centric startups from early stages through growth and acquisition.
Skills
About the Role
You'll be a founding member of Via's new AI Labs, an incubator-style team operating like a startup within the company. This is a rare opportunity to get in at the ground floor of something genuinely new: a dedicated space to move fast, experiment boldly, and build AI-powered products that could fundamentally change how Via and its partner cities operate. You'll have real autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company that's already at scale, without the constraints that usually come with it. If you're experienced at building AI products end-to-end and energized by the idea of doing that with a blank canvas, this is the role for you.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products with a track record of owning features end-to-end rather than working in isolation on models or research
- Deep expertise across the AI/ML stack including LLMs, predictive modelling, and the data infrastructure required to support them in real-world environments
- Strong backend engineering skills, comfortable designing scalable APIs, working with distributed systems, and writing clean, maintainable code
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and early-stage environments, taking ownership without being asked
- Strong communication skills to work cross-functionally and intellectual curiosity to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI
- Comfortable working directly with users and customers, and comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site
Responsibilities
- Build and ship production-grade AI products end-to-end, owning everything from problem framing and data pipeline design through to deployment and iteration in live environments
- Work closely with partners in a forward-deployed manner to deeply understand problems and constraints and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions
- Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve challenging local problems with agentic workflows
- Work across a fast-moving and varied roadmap, contributing to intelligent tooling involving data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences
- Collaborate directly with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities across the business
- Write clean, scalable backend code that powers AI-driven features, designing APIs, managing data flows, and ensuring systems perform reliably at scale
- Help shape the technical culture of AI Labs from the ground up, contributing to how the team builds, reviews, ships, and iterates
- Stay close to the frontier of AI development and bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team proactively
Benefits
- Free medical plans
- 401K matching
- Catered lunch on Wednesdays