---
title: 'Applied AI Engineer at santehq.com'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-santehq-com-new-york-4ty8mr8eqdf9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Applied AI Engineer at santehq.com

- **Company:** santehq.com
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/santehq-com/am9icG9zdDoNgudpJ2L58VnWeKo1DsEX

## Job description

Senior Applied AI Engineer - Applied AI

## About Santé

Santé is the #1 operating system for local retailers.

Our platform runs the entire store — point of sale, integrated payments, eCommerce, inventory management, delivery-app integrations, marketing, bookkeeping, and AI Agents — so the owners of liquor, grocery, and convenience stores can compete like the big chains without losing what makes them local.

We're building a future where the corner liquor store has better technology than the national retailer: one place for selling to customers everywhere with AI agents that spots slow-moving inventory and creates the promotion to move it. Every feature we ship lands in real stores the same week, and the feedback loop is direct — our customers call us by name.

We move fast and ship daily. AI-assisted engineering isn't a talking point here; agents like Devin, Claude, and Codex are part of how the team works every day, and engineers who master that leverage ship multiples of what they could alone.

## About the Team

Applied AI owns the intelligence layer of Santé, including aspects of Merchandising, Custom Reporting, Ecommerce, and Agentic workflows.

This is the team behind our AI Manager — a suite of production agents that handle end-to-end workflows like retail pricing strategies, creating marketing campaigns, maintaining SEO (eCommerce) and developing custom reports that give store owners the insight they need to run a stronger business. This team also owns invoice OCR/CV (structured extraction from messy distributor invoices, with selectable LLM engines) and embedding-based product matching. Nothing here is a demo: every model output lands in front of a real store owner making a real pricing decision.

## About the Role

You'll design, build, and iterate on the agents powering Santé's core merchant experience. Working on this mission-critical team, you'll develop production agent and context-layer applications — turning each store's sales history, catalog, and market context into decisions that make independent retailers money. You'll own your models from research to production, and your work ships into stores the same week.

In this role, you will

- Apply state-of-the-art ML and LLM techniques to problems spanning:- Merchandising intelligence (slow-mover detection, price and promotion recommendation, competition and seasonality signals);
- Document understanding (invoice OCR and structured extraction across LLM engines);
- Retrieval and ranking (embedding-based product matching on pgvector, catalog dedup, contextual recommendations)
- Build agent capabilities on top of Santé's Manager Agent platform — task generation, review workflows, and chat over each store's own data
- Build the evaluation harness for both offline and online techniques, designing experiments and metrics (evals, QA playbooks, Langfuse tracing) that provide deep insight into recommendation quality and merchant impact
- Own the entire model lifecycle from research to production: data analysis, modeling, evaluation, offline/online testing, and iterative improvement — and build autonomous harnesses that let agent squads explore new problem spaces in parallel
- Collaborate cross-functionally with engineers, PMs, and store owners to ensure our AI drives measurable improvements in merchant revenue and hours saved
- Stay at the forefront of ML/AI innovation by evaluating and incorporating emerging research, models, and techniques into the product lifecycle

## Your background looks something like this

- 5+ years building and shipping robust AI products for large-scale, user-facing or data-driven products
- Strong software engineering skills (TypeScript and/or Python, production-quality codebases, collaborative development) and experience using agentic coding tools for large-scale parallel development
- In-depth experience with the full AI lifecycle: data analysis, rigorous evaluation, and ongoing monitoring and improvement
- Proven collaborator and communicator; excels in high-velocity, cross-functional teams
- Curious, driven by end-user and product impact, and passionate about advancing the state of applied ML and AI
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)

Even better

- Experience with LLM context engineering or harness engineering
- Experience in mid-training or post-training frontier open-source models
- Experience with large-scale user-centric and content-centric personalization challenges (user modeling, retrieval, content ranking)
- Experience with LLM observability and eval tooling (Langfuse or similar) in production
- Familiarity with our stack: Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, PostgreSQL with pgvector, Vercel
- Retail, pricing, or demand-forecasting domain experience — you know why moving a slow SKU matters to a store's cash flow

## Compensation

$220k – $300k + Meaningful equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and scope of responsibilities. In addition to base salary, we offer meaningful early-stage equity — this team's work is the foundation the company compounds on.

## Benefits

- Fully company-covered medical and dental benefits.
- 401(k)
- Catered Lunches and Dinners: Santé provides dinner each evening for employees who would like to eat and connect with the team. Lunch is provided on a weekly basis.

## About santehq.com

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Santé is an all-in-one, AI-powered point-of-sale and operations platform purpose-built for liquor and wine retailers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; Y Combinator S23)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Darren Fike (Co-Founder & CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Vertical SaaS for retail (wine & spirits), fintech, e-commerce
- **Target customers**: B2B – independent liquor stores, wine shops, and multi-location retailers; expanding into convenience and local grocery stores
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Help liquor store owners build long-term equity in their businesses” and “solve real-world problems with AI” – giving small business owners time back with a modern operating system.

## Products & Services
- **Santé POS**: A unified point-of-sale system that consolidates receiving, inventory, e-commerce, delivery marketplace integrations (DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, Instacart), marketing, reporting, and payments into a single platform.
- **AI-Powered Invoice Scanning**: Automatically extracts data from distributor invoices, updating inventory levels and unit costs in minutes.
- **Marketing Agent**: Segments customers based on purchase history and triggers email/SMS campaigns for restocks, promotions, or tasting events.
- **Automated E‑commerce Cataloging**: Auto-generates SEO-optimized descriptions and images for thousands of SKUs.
- **RFID-Based Theft Monitoring & Compliance**: Includes state-by-state alcohol shipping regulation management and bottle/keg tracking.
- **Smart Multi-Store Inventory**: Enables seamless inventory transfers between locations with predictive reordering.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metrics**: Total funding of **$7.6M** (seed round, Feb 2026); processed **$500M+ in annual card volume** across hundreds of stores; **400% growth** in the last year.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bonfire Ventures (lead), Operator Collective, Y Combinator, Veridical Ventures, TipTop VC, UpHonest Capital.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanding from liquor stores into grocery and convenience verticals; headcount grew ~1.9% monthly (now 31 employees across 10 countries); backed by top-tier vertical SaaS investors.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep industry focus**: Built specifically for the complex regulatory, inventory (vintage, break‑pack pricing, keg returns) and distributor relationship challenges of the wine & spirits industry.
- **AI‑first platform**: Proprietary AI suite that automates manual workflows (invoice entry, cataloging, customer segmentation) – a moat that legacy POS systems lack.
- **Unified ecosystem**: Combines POS, e‑commerce, delivery, marketing, and payments in one system, eliminating the need for multiple vendors.
- **Fast adoption & traction**: 400% YoY growth and hundreds of stores live, with customers like Wine Cellar of Queens expanding store count because of Santé.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale sales teams** to capture more of the fragmented U.S. liquor retail market.
- **Develop new products** for grocers and convenience stores with similarly complex operations (e.g., age‑restricted items, varied pricing).
- **Continue investing in AI** to further automate retail workflows and differentiate from competitors.

## Why Work Here
- **In‑person culture**: Based in Flatiron, NYC – the team builds together in person with a “world‑class team.”
- **High impact**: With only 31 employees, every hire has outsized influence on product direction and company growth.
- **Backed by elite investors**: Y Combinator, Bonfire Ventures, and others provide strong strategic support and credibility.
- **Mission‑driven**: Work on technology that directly helps small business owners reclaim time and build equity – tangible real‑world impact.
- **Growth trajectory**: 400% annual growth and a clear path to expanding into adjacent retail verticals means career advancement opportunities.
- **Values‑driven**: Company emphasizes clarity of vision, solving real problems with AI, and giving employees “a shot on goal” to win.

## Sources
1. [LinkedIn – Santé Company Page](https://linkedin.com/company/santehq)
2. [Santé Official Website – About Us](https://www.santehq.com/about)
3. [Y Combinator – Santé Jobs Page](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/sante/jobs)
4. [Indexed.vc – Santé Company Profile](https://indexed.vc/companies/santehq)
5. [WebWire – Santé Raises $7.6M Press Release](https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=350499)

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