Senior AI Engineer | Sage Home Loans

This role requires a hybrid schedule and will be based in our South Charlotte, NC Headquarters (Tuesday through Thursday) and work fully remotely on Mondays and Fridays each week.

This role is not open to visa sponsorship or transfer of visa sponsorship including those on H1‑B, F‑1, OPT, STEM‑OPT, or TN visa, nor is it available to work corp‑to‑corp.

Sage Home Loans is on a mission to revolutionize the mortgage industry by making the application and origination processes simple and AI‑powered. We are hiring a Senior AI Engineer to join our Innovation team and build LLM‑powered products that change how mortgages get done.

What You’ll Do:

• Work with cutting‑edge generative AI technologies such as LLMs and collaborate with other highly talented AI and software engineers.
• Help build and improve AI‑enabled products such as automated document processing, auto condition clearing, income calculation, call scoring, and virtual assistants.
• Design and own our AI evaluation infrastructure—golden datasets, automated regression suites, LLM‑as‑judge pipelines, and online quality metrics for our LLM‑powered products.
• Lead model harnessing and training decisions across the AI stack—foundation model selection across vendors, agent frameworks and orchestration, custom fine‑tuning (SFT, DPO, LoRA), and RAG/retrieval design.
• Design safety guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and PII handling appropriate to regulated mortgage workflows.
• Design and execute end‑to‑end AI systems with attention to reliability, latency, cost, and observability in production.
• Take ideas from discovery to production solutions—thinking big, starting small, and scaling fast.
• Partner with business stakeholders and work effectively across business, creative, and engineering groups to solve problems and build a positive culture across teams.
• Provide guidance to the broader applied AI community within Red Ventures on the design and execution of AI projects, especially where you bring specific expertise.
• Further the Sage Engineering team’s technical capabilities by bringing novel methods from the field into Red Ventures through hands‑on prototyping, software development, and teaching others.
• Drive the development of junior team members through mentorship and coaching.

What We’re Looking For:

• 5+ years building and shipping production software, with at least 1 year building LLM‑powered systems. BS/MS in CS, ML, or a related field preferred; equivalent applied experience welcome in lieu of a degree.
• Demonstrated experience shipping LLM‑powered products to production, including hands‑on work with prompt design, agent harnesses, and tool use.
• Hands‑on experience building evaluation frameworks—benchmark design, golden dataset curation, LLM‑as‑judge, and regression testing for prompts and models.
• Experience selecting and integrating foundation models from multiple vendors (Anthropic, OpenAI, open‑weight models), and reasoning about cost, latency, and quality trade‑offs.
• Familiarity with post‑training techniques (SFT, DPO, LoRA) and RAG/retrieval system design, including embedding model selection. Comfort operating in a regulated/financial environment is a plus.
• Experience with end‑to‑end model development, deployment, evaluation, and monitoring workflows, including LLM‑based products in production.
• Proficiency with a modern data platform (Databricks, Snowflake, or similar).
• Familiarity with TypeScript/React/Node a plus, for app integration (nice‑to‑have).
• Ability to methodically understand business context, define value propositions, and formulate and solve complex applied AI problems.
• Ability to clearly articulate the “why” behind proposed AI solutions to relevant stakeholders.
• Ability to own key deliverables and use problem‑solving to deliver projects on time, iterating when justified by incremental value.
• Ability to intake business requests and priorities, prioritize bodies of work, and communicate project status, timeline, and technical results to broad audiences.
• Bias to action and proactive communication.
• Experience expanding the knowledge of an AI engineering team through teaching and mentoring on topics where you have specific expertise.
• Experience leveraging technical expertise to identify the feasibility of potential AI projects, ensuring the team delivers value on projects that are feasible.
• Stays current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape and translates new techniques, models, and tooling into shipped product—a commitment to getting better every day.

Compensation:

Total Cash Compensation Range: $150k – $220k per year.

Benefits:

• Health Insurance Coverage (medical, dental, and vision)
• Life Insurance
• Short and Long‑Term Disability Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Holiday Pay
• 401(k) with match
• Employee Assistance Program
• Paid Parental Bonding Benefit Program
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO). Full‑time employees accrue 20 days of PTO for a full calendar year annually, with an increase to 25 days after five years of service.

Red Ventures is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or any other basis protected by law. Employment at Red Ventures is based solely on a person’s merit and qualifications.

We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to qualified individuals with disabilities. This includes providing reasonable accommodation where appropriate. Should you require a reasonable accommodation to apply or participate in the job application or interview process, please contact