---
title: 'Applied AI Engineer at SafetyKit'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-safetykit-san-francisco-s165xt8n9eqw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Applied AI Engineer at SafetyKit

- **Company:** SafetyKit
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-04-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/safetykit/c619ef1d-7096-4bcc-9641-4ee49268c50b

## Job description

We’re inventing the future of B2B SaaS with AI agents. We’re betting on language models and we’re betting on scale. You’ll test new models the day they come out and understand their characteristics better than their developers do. You’ll manage our model alpha program with OpenAI, and work directly with their research and product teams to discover unknown capabilities in new models. You’ll work directly with customers every day and have unusual influence over operations and policy-making at the world’s biggest companies.

## Responsibilities

- Turn language models into useful, functional, and beautiful products.
- Scope and implement entirely novel applications of AI agents (adversarial webcrawling, weapons identification, red-teaming, ingredient extraction, etc.)
- Architect and implement workflows that power SafetyKit's risk AI agents
- Design and conduct rigorous experiments to evaluate models' relative strengths, weaknesses, and optimal use cases
- Use codegen models to move 10x faster than you did two years ago

## About you

- You love language models.
- You have the patience to be rigorous.
- You act like an owner in everything you do.
- People tell you you pick things up unusually quickly.
- You love the weird little details of life in our customer’s companies.
- You care about your work and you care about moving fast. A lot.
- You know more than you need to know. You have an insatiable curiosity.

## About SafetyKit

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: SafetyKit builds AI agents that automate risk, compliance, and safety workflows for large platforms, replacing manual human review teams.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, Y Combinator Summer 2023 batch)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: David Graunke (previously led engineering for risk reviews at Stripe) and Steven Guichard (former CEO of Carbic, co-founder of Thomas Street)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Trust & safety, fraud prevention, compliance, content moderation – delivered as a vertical AI platform for enterprises.
- **Target customers**: Large marketplaces, payments companies, social platforms, and financial institutions (B2B, enterprise).
- **Mission or purpose**: To end the manual toil of human risk reviewers by replacing them with language models, making platforms safer while reducing cost and trauma associated with manual review.

## Products & Services
- **SafetyKit Platform**: An end-to-end detection and decisioning engine that ingests 100% of a platform’s content and data, analyzes entities and relationships to detect scams, abuse, and fraud rings, and enforces business policies automatically.  
  - Types: SaaS / AI agents  
  - Key features: low latency (<3200ms), high ingest rate (4.2k/s), built-in network detection, coverage across onboarding, account monitoring, messages, listings, posts, and livestreams.  
  - Relevant risk vectors: AML sanctions & embargoes, harassment & violence, child safety (CSAM), seller credit risk, synthetic identity.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $32.1M (as of May 2025).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - Series A (May 2025): $27.2M from 6 investors (lead not publicly specified)
  - Seed Round (Dec 2023): $4.4M led by First Round Capital
  - Pre-Seed (Sep 2023): $500K led by Y Combinator
- **Growth Signals**:  
  - Headcount grew 29.4% in the last month (LinkedIn estimate, 23 total employees as of mid-2025).  
  - Customers include Eventbrite, Upwork, Character.ai, Substack, Faire, a $10B+ marketplace, and a $100B+ payments company.  
  - Eventbrite “cut false positives in half” using SafetyKit; Upwork reviews 100% of job posts before they go live.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Vertical AI specialization** – purpose-built for trust & safety workflows, not a generic LLM wrapper.
- **Entity-level analysis** – ingests all associated data points, not just single elements, to detect fraud rings and synthetic identities.
- **Proven at scale** – already deployed by some of the world’s largest platforms with demanding latency and throughput requirements.
- **Policy configurability** – ingests business policies and SOPs to tailor enforcement, enabling rapid coverage expansion.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand coverage across more risk vectors and platform surfaces (e.g., livestreams, financial crimes).
- Deepen relationships with existing enterprise customers while acquiring new ones in payments, marketplaces, and fintech.
- Continue improving AI model accuracy to further reduce false positives and manual review workloads.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a “tightly-bound team of autonomous operators” with a high bar for talent and a bias for action. The team includes former Stripe, Netflix, Meta, and MIT/Princeton engineers.
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Fully in-person in San Francisco, five days a week.
- **Impact**: Early-stage company (pre-product-market fit achieved) with massive customers – “99.9% of the value we’ll ever produce is ahead of us.”
- **Perks & Environment**: High ownership, direct collaboration with founders, and a chance to shape a product already used by billion-dollar platforms. Emphasis on learning from the best and moving at “maximum velocity.”

## Sources
1. [SafetyKit Homepage](https://www.safetykit.com/)
2. [SafetyKit Careers Page](https://www.safetykit.com/jobs)
3. [Y Combinator – SafetyKit Profile](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/safetykit)
4. [LinkedIn – SafetyKit Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/safetykit)
5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com – SafetyKit](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/safetykit)

## Other roles at SafetyKit

- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-safetykit-san-francisco-hew0aa26m9ww) — San Francisco, CA
- [Business Development Representative (BDR)](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-bdr-safetykit-san-francisco-aen1wqsssr6y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Marketing Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-generalist-safetykit-san-francisco-gk90ytq05t88) — San Francisco, CA
- [GTM Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-generalist-safetykit-san-francisco-vt9181f4jfk5) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-designer-safetykit-san-francisco-fbzfdsjw535s) — San Francisco, CA
- [Backend Engineer (Product, Infra)](https://feeny.ai/job/backend-engineer-product-infra-safetykit-san-francisco-dg2hhpjv70sn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Backend Engineer (Staff)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-staff-safetykit-san-francisco-kscxynnke86y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Frontend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/frontend-engineer-safetykit-san-francisco-gaez6q6y1tw7) — San Francisco, CA
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