AI Engineer

Job Description

**Build the infrastructure the fine wine market was missing.**
Turn the world’s wine data into real‑time pricing & liquidity intelligence and put it in every wine professional’s hands. We’re bootstrapped, profitable, and default‑alive.

**H1B sponsorship friendly**

**Why this role exists**

We’re democratizing access to reliable market data in an industry worth $450 billion that still runs on phone calls, Excel spreadsheets, and relationships. It is one of the last major markets on earth without real-time liquidity signals or centralized data. We believe price data should be accessible, not hoarded. The data exists publicly – we organize it, verify it, and make it work for everyone.

The industry is highly fragmented, with over 1 million producers with no single player holding >1% market share, leaving it disconnected and ripe for digitization. WineLabs is the first to ingest this global chaos (merchants, auctions, exchanges, critics), structure it, and build the “Bloomberg Terminal” that powers the future of the trade.

**The mandate**

You will co-own the technical architecture and AI strategy end‑to‑end with the CEO. We believe one engineer armed with the right AI stack can out-ship a traditional team of five. Your focus will be on three core intelligence loops:

1. **LLM-based engineering:**
Orchestrate LLMs, agents & deterministic pipelines to ingest, structure, and sanitize the world’s messy wine data.
2. **Generate Signals:**
Build the “brain” of the product by leveraging AI models to improve our data & our insights.
3. **Close the Feedback Loop:**
Shipping is just the first step. You will work with early users to validate your features, identify friction points, and iterate quickly to ensure the product delivers real utility.

**What you’ll do**

– **Solve “Unstructured-to-Structured” at scale:**
Instead of writing brittle scrapers, you will build LLM-driven extraction pipelines. You will deploy agents capable of reading merchant catalogs in any format and converting them into strict schemas with high fidelity.
– **Ship GenAI Product Features:**
Build RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) workflows to let users query the data naturally. Use LLMs to synthesize critic reviews, explain pricing volatility, or predict liquidity trends.
– **Own the “AI” Stack:**
Manage the lifecycle of our models, set up evaluation metrics, and improve our models continuously.
– **Founder-Level Engineering:**
This is not a research role. Everything you’ll ship will be used by our clients and will provide immediate value. So you’ll be constantly balancing the cutting edge of research with the pragmatism of a production system.

**You’ll excel here if you have**

**Requirements**

– You are an AI-augmented builder and view LLMs as an infinite supply of interns.
– Comfortable owning infra, data models, and evaluations end‑to‑end.
– Evidence you have/want to build products that people care about.
– Founder‑level ownership. You like closing loops and solving problems, not JIRA tickets.

**Preferred Qualifications**

– You’ve built agents that browse, scrape, or perform multi-step actions.
– You understand concepts like “bid/ask spread,” “liquidity,” or “order books” and want to apply them to a physical asset.
– You don’t need to be a wine expert, but you’re curious why a bottle of Burgundy costs $15,000 and want to map the data behind it.

**How we work**

– **Velocity is quality.**
We prefer a working feature shipped today using AI assistance over “perfect” code written by hand next week.
– **Bootstrapped by choice.**
Durable product business > pitch deck & a fancy raise.
– **Fun First.**
We like to build products that people care about and are having fun.
– **US Visa friendly**
(we’ve been through it).

**How to apply**

Email
**ilias@wine-labs.com**
with your resume and an example of a hard technical problem you solved with AI.