Hiring: AI Technical Lead (Principal Engineer) Company: EverQuote Location: Cambridge, MA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-16 10:21:47 Employment Type: Full-time / Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : Fine-tuning, LLM, Machine Learning, Python, REST, Rust About the job Experience: •8+ years in engineering, with senior or lead ownership of complex technical systems, including hands-on work in machine learning or LLMs. Required Skills: •Own the architecture: decide where the agent’s reasoning runs, which models we use, how they are packaged, and how AI platforms connect to us, and back those calls with testing. •Build and tune the models: fine-tune open-weight models for our use, and decide when tuning, retrieval, or prompting is the right tool. •Stand up the serving and infrastructure: deploy the agent and MCP server so they are reliable, fast, and affordable to run, with versioning and a way to roll back. •Build the testing into the system: programmatic eval sets, guardrails, and monitoring for quality, drift, cost, and speed, so we catch problems before agents do. •Design the data model and tools with the AI product lead: the request and response payloads, the reasoning we expose, and the trust signals. •Set the engineering patterns and standards the team builds on, and keep the code and architecture documented. •Keep cost and speed honest: watch what inference costs, and make the trade-offs that keep it sustainable as volume grows. •Work in the open. Help publish our code, architecture, and findings. Qualifications: •Deep, current, hands-on experience in the AI and LLM space. You work on this every day, not from the sidelines. •Real experience with open-weight models: you have fine-tuned them (LoRA, QLoRA, SFT, DPO, or similar) and run them yourself, not just called a hosted API. •Enterprise-level design and architecture experience, with a track record of leading large, ambitious projects and delivering them. •Strong grasp of evaluation and guardrails: building eval sets, catching failure modes, and monitoring quality, drift, cost, and speed. •Fluency with the serving and ops stack: model serving, containers and orchestration, and monitoring, on at least one major cloud. •Strong communication. You can explain a technical trade-off to an engineer and to a non-technical leader, and lead with data. •Comfort with ambiguity and a bias for action in a space where the standards change month to month. •A track record of leading large, ambitious projects with a small team and delivering them. We care more about what you have shipped and the judgment you showed than the revenue the project generated. •Hands-on fine-tuning and deployment of open-weight or open-source models, with real production experience. •Enterprise design and architecture experience for complex, high-reliability systems. Compensation: •$202,800 - $238,600 / year Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!