--- title: 'Research Engineer, Applied AI Engineering at OuterSignal' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-applied-ai-engineering-outersignal-new-york-8gf2t7ejgmja' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-05' --- # Research Engineer, Applied AI Engineering at OuterSignal - **Company:** OuterSignal - **Location:** New York, NY - **Compensation:** $200k–$300k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-07-14 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outersignal/9db359aa-5baf-4e83-b10e-91c63cb15b6d ## Job description ## About OuterSignal We are building the customer intelligence layer for commerce. Brands know when an order comes in, but they only see ~5% of the real story. We show them the other 95%: not just who bought, but who that person is — the execs, influencers, journalists, retail buyers, investors, and everyday customers who become a brand’s best evangelists. Our platform enriches every order in real time with professional and personal signals, builds personas, and powers everything from surprise-and-delight outreach to smarter email flows, analytics, and BD leads. We’re a small, high-performing team building the category-defining platform for e-commerce customer intelligence, backed by a world-class investor base. ## ABOUT THIS ROLE: This is a backend-focused software engineering role specializing in applying ML/AI to user-facing products. You will work on the systems that power OuterSignal’s AI/data pipeline: prompt chaining, eval design, research APIs, model routing, and prod orchestration. The evolution of this role will include inference serving, fine-tuning, and synthetic dataset generation. ## WHAT YOU’LL DO: - Build and improve production AI/data pipelines that run across LLMs, APIs, databases, and workflow systems like Temporal, Postgres, ClickHouse, and Kubernetes. - Design evals and build Jupyter notebooks that help us measure model behavior, data quality, extraction accuracy, and end-to-end customer impact. - Build observability into AI workflows so we can understand cost, latency, reliability, and quality. - Experiment with new models, retrieval strategies, structured-output techniques, prompt/program architectures, and model-routing approaches. - Integrate with fast-changing research and AI APIs, understand their behavior deeply, and build robust abstractions around them. - Help define the foundation for future inference serving, fine-tuning, dataset generation, and model evaluation infrastructure. ## WHO YOU ARE: - A strong engineer who can reason through distributed systems, data pipelines, databases, and are comfortable working across varying programming languages. - You are extremely AI-fluent and actively use modern AI tools to move faster. - You have strong first-principles thinking and can turn ambiguous problems into hypotheses, experiments, and shipped systems. - You have good judgment and taste: you simplify aggressively, avoid unnecessary complexity, and care about maintainability. - You care about measurement. You do not trust vibes when evals, tests, traces, or data can tell you what is actually happening. - Bonus: You have experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, vLLM, Ray, MLflow, RAG, fine-tuning & RL, inference serving, and/or model evaluation systems. ## WHY JOIN NOW: - Early seat: You’ll help shape the DNA of OuterSignal’s Applied AI Engineering org from the beginning. - Massive upside: Meaningful equity in a venture-backed company defining a new category in commerce intelligence. - Real AI systems: You’ll work on production AI that directly affects customers, data quality, and revenue — not demos or toy agents. - Big surface area: You’ll help connect research ideas to production systems and customer-facing product. - Right moment: We’re past prototype, real brands already rely on us, and we have strong PMF — but the ceiling is still wide open. ## About OuterSignal ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OuterSignal provides an AI-powered customer intelligence platform that helps e-commerce and DTC brands identify VIP customers, enrich customer profiles with demographic data, and personalize marketing across channels. - **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup) - **Headquarters**: Wilmington, Delaware, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Zach Zelner (CEO & Co-founder), Noah Friedman (Co-founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Customer Intelligence, eCommerce Analytics, Marketing Technology (Martech) - **Target customers**: B2B; Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands and e-commerce stores, specifically those using Shopify and other major e-commerce platforms. - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Every brand should know who’s actually buying." Their mission is to rebuild the customer relationship in e-commerce, which they believe has been "hollowed out by ad networks, marketplaces, and middlemen." ## Products & Services - **OuterSignal Platform**: The core SaaS product acts as an "automated, real-time researcher." It integrates with a brand's e-commerce platform to: - **VIP Customer Detection**: Instantly identifies celebrities, influencers, athletes, and strategic partners within a brand's order history. - **Customer Persona Clusters & Deep Analytics**: Enriches customer data with demographic attributes (age, occupation, property value, social following) for advanced segmentation and analysis. - **Precision Personalization**: Allows brands to create highly targeted segments for export to Meta and CRM platforms, moving beyond purchase history to target *who* the customer is. - **Real-time Notifications**: Alerts via Slack or email when a high-value customer places an order. - **Pricing Tiers**: Starter ($49/month), Pro ($199/month + $0.03/unique new customer), Enterprise (custom pricing). Their pricing model is unique: brands only pay to process a customer the first time; returning customer orders are free. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (early-stage private company). - **Key Metric**: Total funding raised of $4.3M (Convertible Note) as of a recent round, 2026. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by Top Shelf Ventures (led by Daniel Noah). Partners include Klaviyo, Shopify, Zapier, and PostPilot. Powering "hundreds of the fastest growing brands" including HexClad, Jones Road, and Jolie. - **Growth Signals**: - **Recent Acquisition**: Acquired Monocle, an AI-powered lifecycle marketing platform, in May 2026 to build an integrated AI personalization stack. - **Workforce Growth**: Monthly employee growth rate of +10.5%, with 11 employees currently. - **Customer Results**: Case studies show a +47.2% revenue lift from persona-based email campaigns and 20x+ ROAS on direct mail. ## Competitive Advantages - **"Glass Box" AI**: OuterSignal positions itself as transparent ("from black box to glass box"), giving brands clarity on *who* their customers are rather than just opaque, AI-generated segments. - **High Match Rate**: Claims a 94% match rate for enriching customer data, which is critical for personalization efficacy. - **Founder-Market Fit**: Built by founders with deep DTC operational experience (ran 45+ Shopify stores, built and sold multiple DTC companies), solving a problem they directly encountered. - **Unique Pricing Model**: The "pay per new customer" model is a significant moat, as processing returning customers becomes free, aligning the cost with customer acquisition value. ## Strategic Focus - **AI Agentic Intelligence**: Focus on building autonomous AI agents (as highlighted by the Monocle acquisition) to automate complex, personalized customer journeys across email, SMS, and web. - **Platform Integration**: Deepening integrations with major e-commerce and marketing platforms (Klaviyo, Meta, Shopify) to become a central data layer for DTC brands. - **Enterprise Expansion**: Moving upmarket with Enterprise plans that offer white-glove onboarding and dedicated support for high-volume brands (30,000+ orders/month). ## Why Work Here - **Founding Team & Culture**: The leadership is composed of seasoned DTC operators and engineers from companies like Zapier, Box, and Glassdoor, creating a culture built on solving hard operational problems. - **Early Stage Impact**: With only 11 employees and rapid growth, new hires would have massive ownership and direct impact on the product and company trajectory. - **Technical Environment**: The tech stack is modern (Docker, TypeScript, Python, Redis, Microservices), suggesting a strong engineering culture focused on building scalable, data-intensive systems. - **Remote Work Policy**: Not explicitly stated as remote or in-office, but the small team size and modern tech stack suggest a high degree of flexibility. - **Active Hiring**: Currently has 5 open roles including Senior Software Engineer, Account Executive, and Sales Development Representative, indicating a growth phase where early employees can shape the company. ## Sources 1. [OuterSignal Website](https://www.outersignal.com/) 2. [OuterSignal About Page](https://www.outersignal.com/about) 3. [OuterSignal LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outersignal) 4. [OuterSignal Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outersignal) 5. [CB Insights Company Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/outersignal) 6. [OuterSignal Acquires Monocle (FinSMEs)](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/outersignal) ## Other roles at OuterSignal - [Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-manager-outersignal-united-states-62n9y6gxetr0) — United States - [Head of Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-partnerships-outersignal-united-states-4bmq23vmzkwp) — United States - [Business Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-manager-outersignal-united-states-ygnpjhtfj6hp) — United States - [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-outersignal-new-york-qj3fpk8nnbhe) — New York, NY - [Head of Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-marketing-outersignal-united-states-rb3yyjv9yqyf) — United States - [Executive Assistant to the Co-founders](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-to-the-co-founders-outersignal-new-york-hnq9mpxbg7k4) — New York, NY - [Senior Customer Success Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-customer-success-manager-outersignal-united-states-bhkzyh30wg6a) — United States - [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-outersignal-new-york-pr44scettd51) — New York, NY