---
title: 'Applied AI Engineer at daydream'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-daydream-san-francisco-w6s17m5z69zx'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Applied AI Engineer at daydream

- **Company:** daydream
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$260k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-05-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/withdaydream/a698651a-3d01-43ec-9f96-6c4a02908ff9

## Job description

## About sunbeam

[sunbeam](https://withsunbeam.com) is building a fully autonomous SEO agent. It monitors rankings and competitors, finds content and technical SEO opportunities, writes and improves pages, and publishes to the customer's website. The agent runs 24/7. It proactively finds work to do, prioritizes tasks, and executes across tools, messaging its manager in Slack when it needs context or approval. We are not building a chatbot. We are building an employee.

## Why us

We ran an [SEO agency](https://www.withdaydream.com/) before building sunbeam. We did SEO for Clay, Replit, Hims & Hers, Rho, and others. We know the work deeply, and we are encoding that expertise into an agent that can do the job with full independence. We have raised $20M+ from First Round Capital, Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, and SOMA Capital. We are starting with SEO, but the long-term goal is every acquisition channel. Marketing services is a $1T/year industry. If AI has automated coding, marketing is next.

The Engineering Challenge Fully autonomous agents are still mostly unsolved. sunbeam has to plan and prioritize work across weeks and months without a human prompt. It has to reason from messy customer context, durable memory, live search data, CMS state, analytics, and prior decisions. It has to use tools safely, know when to act, know when to ask, recover when integrations fail, and keep improving as it learns more about the company. The next years of AI will be defined by this shift from "ask → answer" to "observe → act."

## What You Will Do

- Build agent capabilities end to end: planning loops, tool use, prompts and instructions, memory, review workflows, evals, backend services, and customer-facing product surfaces.
- Design safe action systems across integrations like GitHub, Webflow, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Notion, and Slack.
- Build observability and evaluation workflows so we can understand agent behavior, catch regressions, and measure whether Sunbeam is getting better at the job.
- Debug production agent runs from the model output all the way through database state, tool calls, customer context, and external API behavior.
- Work directly with customers and internal operators to turn expert growth judgment into product behavior.
- Ship quickly across the stack. On a given week, you might change agent instructions, add an MCP tool, create a skill to manage memory, tune a review gate, and fix a frontend workflow.

## What We Are Looking For

- You have been building AI products for 3+ years, with experience in production LLM agents, evals, tool-use systems, retrieval/memory systems, or workflow automation.
- You are comfortable working across the stack and across levels of abstraction: from "what should the agent do next?" to "why did this Postgres row end up in the wrong state?"
- You have high agency. You notice important problems, form a point of view, and drive them to completion without waiting for a detailed spec.
- You want to understand the customer problem deeply enough to encode judgment into software.
- You are excited by early-stage ambiguity, fast iteration, and a small team where everyone touches product, engineering, design, and customer problems.

## Nice to Have

- Experience at a marketing, sales, or growth AI company.
- Experience building from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10 at an early-stage startup.
- Familiarity with C#, .NET, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Postgres, or MCP-style tool integrations.

The Team Small team, San Francisco office, shipping every day.

- Shravan (CTO), formerly an Engineering Lead at Flixed and a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he worked on mass-scale web scraping for Facebook Jobs and Meta Reality Labs.
- Nico (Product), previously led growth at daydream and ran SEO for Anthropic, Clay, Replit, and others.
- Vishruth (Founding Applied AI Engineer), previously a Data Scientist at Klaviyo specializing in NLP, with a research background from Cornell.
- Daniel (Founding Applied AI Engineer), formerly a Data Engineer on Tesla's Autopilot team and previously Lead Data Engineer at Replit.
- Tom (Founding Designer), who previously led product design at Blockless and now leads our frontend efforts.

Location This role is based in San Francisco and requires in-person collaboration five days a week. We offer paid relocation for candidates outside the Bay Area.

## Compensation & Benefits

$180,000–$220,000 base salary range plus equity. Medical, dental, and vision insurance. Lunch on in-office days. Wellness and learning stipends. Two retreats a year. Frequent team dinners and outings.

## About daydream

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: daydream delivers an unfair advantage in organic search by combining a proven methodology with AI‑powered SEO agents and dedicated experts.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with presence in the Philippines and Spain)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Thenuka Karunaratne (CEO) and Shravan Rajinikanth (CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI‑native SEO and organic growth services (agency + software platform)
- Target customers: Growth‑stage companies and enterprises needing scalable organic search (B2B)
- Mission: To give companies access to world‑class marketing execution and distribution by combining top‑tier human expertise with AI agents that model the best practitioners.

## Products & Services
- **Full‑Service SEO Agency**: End‑to‑end organic search strategy including programmatic SEO, editorial SEO, technical SEO, and content creation.
- **SEO Agents (Platform)**: AI agents modeled after the top 1% of practitioners that automate execution tasks (keyword strategy, content generation, technical audits).
- **Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)**: Services to ensure brands are cited by large language models (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT) and AI search platforms.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $21.2M across seed and Series A rounds.
  - Recent $15M Series A (led by WndrCo) announced April 2026 [[Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/)].
  - Previously raised $6.2M seed round (May 2024) and $2.5M pre‑seed (December 2023) [[Axios](https://www.axios.com/)].
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: WndrCo (Series A lead), along with growth leaders and advisors including Lenny Rachitsky, Eli Schwartz, Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Won Shorty Award for Best SEO/SEM Campaign (2026); achieved 19.8 million clicks via programmatic SEO across Google and AI platforms; recognized with a GEO Bronze award; headcount grew 33% quarterly with 27 employees as of mid‑2026.

## Competitive Advantages
- Combined AI agent + human expert model (“forward‑deployed” delivery) that provides both automation and strategic accountability.
- Deep specialization in programmatic SEO and GEO, an emerging AI search channel.
- Proven methodology built by founders with years of hands‑on SEO experience (previously built Flixed’s programmatic engine).
- Backing and advisory from top growth practitioners (Lenny Rachitsky, Eli Schwartz, etc.).

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building and refining SEO agents for execution at scale.
- Expand GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) offerings as AI citations become a primary traffic source.
- Grow full‑service agency model while investing in platform capabilities.
- Scale headcount and client base, particularly in engineering and growth roles.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Small team doing big work” – high ownership, faster growth, and room to dream bigger. Values emphasize ownership, proactive communication, resilient optimism, and commitment.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Hybrid office in San Francisco with commuter benefit; meals provided on in‑office days.
- **Benefits**: Medical, dental, vision (HSA/FSA), Teladoc, Talkspace; annual learning & development stipend; personal well‑being stipend (gym, fitness, therapy); two company retreats per year; monthly team dinners/outings.
- **Compensation**: Senior / Staff Engineer salary range $161,637 – $200,000 (plus equity).
- **Open Roles**: Primarily engineering (Senior/Staff Engineer, AI Engineer, Applied AI Engineer).

## Sources
1. [withdaydream.com](https://www.withdaydream.com/) – Company overview and operating model
2. [withdaydream.com/careers](https://www.withdaydream.com/careers) – Careers page, benefits, job listings
3. [withdaydream.com/company](https://www.withdaydream.com/company) – About us, team, values, investors
4. [LinkedIn/withdaydream](https://www.linkedin.com/company/withdaydream) – Employee data, funding details, updates
5. [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/) – Series A raise of $15M (April 2026)
6. [Axios](https://www.axios.com/) – $2.5M pre‑seed raise (December 2023)

## Other roles at daydream

- [Growth Lead, SEO & AI Visibility](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-lead-seo-ai-visibility-daydream-remote-5qf52z02b7hg)
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