Staff AI Engineer

About Spara

Spara is building enterprise-grade AI agents to instantly engage, qualify, & convert sales leads into pipeline & revenue. We believe every company will soon provide AI-powered, human-level sales conversations to their customers—and we’re building the platform to make that possible.

Sales is the economic engine of every company, representing an addressable market of $28B. We're solving this complex, high revenue problem with a multi-modal approach including chat, email, voice, and beyond. This gives us a significant advantage in the market and presents exciting engineering opportunities.

We are a tight-knit, experienced team building a multi-billion dollar AI-first company in the heart of New York City. Our culture emphasizes thoughtful decisions, sustainable development practices, and steady momentum building on deep expertise.

Spara is backed by $15M in funding from top-tier venture capital firms, led by Radical Ventures & Inspired Capital, and supported by AI luminaries including founders of PyTorch and Google Cloud TPU, as well as Heads of Sales at Anthropic and OpenAI.

We are led by seasoned multi-time founders with deep AI and go-to-market expertise:

• David, previous co-founder/CEO of Triplemint, ran training, coaching, and operations for a 250 person sales team. He led Triplemint to acquisition and currently sits on the board of The Agency RE, a $250M revenue business.

• Zander was technical co-founder of Nomad Health (now post-Series D). He most recently led Platform at Hyperscience AI, developing workflow orchestration systems for computer vision models.

This Role

As a Staff ML Engineer at Spara, you will:

• Architect and build Spara’s AI engine, powering seamless, intelligent interactions across chat, email, voice, and beyond

• Define quantitative success criteria for Spara's behavior across multiple dimensions, running online and offline evaluations to achieve and maintain best-in-class performance and reliability

• Craft exceptional user experiences by prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and orchestrating foundation models to deliver precise, engaging, and personalized interactions

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy while collaborating closely with leadership to shape the product roadmap and technical vision

• Drive innovation by staying current with best practices and emerging trends in AI application development

• Deliver outsized impact by deeply understanding customer needs and identifying opportunities to be a force-multiplier across our team of experienced engineers

• Contribute to our culture of sustainable innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement

Spara is built with a cutting-edge stack

We ship to production multiple times a day, and continuously adopt modern tooling and practices to move quickly while maintaining quality.

• FastAPI / Python

• React / Typescript, Vite, Tailwind

• Postgres + pgvector

• Multiple foundation models, including OpenAI and Anthropic

• Google Cloud, Docker

• GitHub Actions

Qualifications

• 7+ years engineering experience, including a strong focus or demonstrated deep interest in the rapidly emerging landscape of large language models and related technologies

• Proven track record designing and deploying sophisticated ML/AI systems in production environments to drive measurable business impact

• Strong grasp of software development methodologies, modern tooling, and technologies across the stack

• Proven ability to thrive in early-stage, agile environments and define solutions in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Advanced degree in Machine Learning is nice to have but not a must

Location & Work Schedule

• Hybrid: 3 days per week in our office in downtown Manhattan, with the option to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays

Benefits

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package

• Sustainable work culture that values focused work and professional growth

• Collaborative environment with experienced engineers solving cutting-edge challenges

• In-office culture in NYC with flexibility for work-life balance

• Opportunity to create measurable, real-world impact from day one