---
title: 'Senior Applied AI Engineer at Qualitate'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-applied-ai-engineer-qualitate-new-york-2acnt7vf4xxf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Senior Applied AI Engineer at Qualitate

- **Company:** Qualitate
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/qualitate/06ffa5ef-2b0e-47fa-91c2-3ae1712e4fa5

## Job description

## ABOUT QUALITATE

Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis - replacing weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output.

Expert research is a broken industry dominated by legacy incumbents with expensive, manual, and slow services. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling expert calls, and synthesizing insights across fragmented providers. The process takes weeks to produce short-lived intelligence.

Qualitate transforms this workflow by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI. Qualitate’s AI Moderator interviews thousands of experts simultaneously each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. The platform turns these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language. Our customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms.

## THE ROLE

We’re looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to help build the LLM and retrieval systems at the core of our AI Moderator - the engine that conducts thousands of real-time expert interviews and turns them into structured, queryable intelligence. You’ll work at the intersection of applied research and production engineering: designing agentic pipelines, scaling retrieval over proprietary data, and shipping systems that directly power what our customers see. This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small founding team - your architecture decisions and code will define how the product scales.

## THE DAY-TO-DAY:

- Own the LLM orchestration layer that drives our AI Moderator’s real-time, multi-turn expert interviews, from prompt and context design to model routing and latency optimization.
- Instrument evals, monitoring, and guardrails for AI systems running in production, so quality issues surface before customers see them.
- Build production APIs and services that turn raw interview data into novel, structured, queryable insights for customers, in partnership with product and data engineering.
- Work cross-functionally with our research team to build and ship AI-powered research assets that are surfaced to customers.

## WHO THIS ROLE IS FOR

- 5+ years building and shipping applied AI/ML systems in production, ideally including time at a startup or other fast-paced environment.
- Deep, hands-on LLM experience - prompt/system design, retrieval-augmented generation, tool/function calling, and structured output design across multiple model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, open-weight models).
- Strong backend engineering in Python/TypeScript with experience designing and shipping APIs and microservices.
- Vector database and search know-how and experience optimizing retrieval quality and latency at scale.
- Comfort with unstructured, messy data - audio, transcripts, financial documents - and the pipelines needed to turn it into model-ready input.
- A bias for ownership - you can take a problem from rough prototype to production without needing a detailed spec.

## WHAT SETS YOU APART

- Prior experience as an applied AI/ML engineer for a technology startup.
- Experience with agentic or multi-turn conversational systems - voice or chat - operating in production with real users.
- Experience building or hardening evaluation frameworks (offline + online evals, LLM-as-judge, regression testing on prompt/model changes) for production AI systems.
- Familiarity with speech-to-text transcription models (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Whisper, or similar).
- ETL and data engineering experience for dealing with messy unstructured data and setting up automated processes to ingest and transform the data in a relational database
- A background in fintech, research, or another AI-driven, data-intensive startup environment.

WHAT YOU’LL BUILD IN THE FIRST 90 DAYS

- Ship improvements to the LLM orchestration layer powering live AI Moderator interviews, with real customer traffic on the line.
- Help improve our downstream LLM processes — retrieval relevance, or post-processing — by iterating labeled data → eval → prompt/code → re-eval.
- Partner with the founding team to define what parts of the retrieval and generation stack to build versus buy as usage scales.
- Help architect an MCP that sits on top of our proprietary dataset and the relevant tools that make up the orchestration layer

## COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Compensation: Competitive base salary + bonus
- Equity: Meaningful early-stage grant with upside tied to company growth.
- Benefits: Health coverage, flexible PTO, paid holidays.
- Location: Full-time, in-person in New York City.

## WHAT TO EXPECT WORKING AT QUALITATE

- Excellence. You’ll be held accountable to an exceptionally high bar and impact
- High velocity. Fast paced work environment in terms of growth, decision making, and time to impact
- High agency. Ownership over how you work, not just what you work on. We hire people we trust to figure it out.
- A builder’s mindset. You’ll create the processes, playbooks, and systems that define how this company scales.
- Shared ambition. A small, early team disrupting the multi-billion dollar market research industry with AI.
- Joy. We work hard and genuinely enjoy working with each other. Dedication to our work is matched only by our passion for fostering an enjoyable, collaborative work environment.

Qualitate is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.

## About Qualitate

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Qualitate is an AI-powered expert intelligence platform that automates primary research for investment firms and enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (seed stage; raised $7M)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Sagar Kadakia (CEO & Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI-native primary research, expert networks, market intelligence
- **Target customers**: B2B – investment firms (hedge funds, credit funds, private equity), financial services, and enterprise strategy teams
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Equipping every company with the world’s most valuable asset: expert intelligence.”

## Products & Services
- **AI Moderator**: An AI agent that autonomously conducts structured interviews with verified experts, from study design to moderation and insight creation.
- **Continuous Market Intelligence**: Dashboards that track company momentum, competitive threats, and market signals through 350,000+ minutes of expert conversations, analyst research, and curated data.
- **AI Analyst**: An AI-powered assistant that can answer questions, generate executive briefings, and launch custom surveys across the intelligence library.
- **Compliance Suite**: Automatic MNPI and PII screening, firm-level access controls, and a dedicated compliance portal for regulated environments.
- **Custom Research (Diligence, Win/Loss, Channel Checks)**: On-demand, AI-facilitated primary studies delivered in under a week (typically 5 days).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – $7M seed round (announced in 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly named (listed only as “World-Class Investors”)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 25 employees as of mid-2025 with 12% monthly headcount growth (LinkedIn)
  - Proprietary data engine trained on 350,000+ minutes of expert discussions
  - Coverage of 500+ companies and 10,000+ technology markets
  - Trusted by “the world’s largest investment funds and corporations”

## Competitive Advantages
- **Vertically integrated**: Owns the expert panel, moderation, and analysis stack – no third-party dependencies or handoff gaps.
- **Proprietary data engine**: The AI moderator improves with every interview on the platform, creating a data moat that third-party networks cannot replicate.
- **Compliance-first design**: Built for sensitive environments with automated screening and firm-level controls.
- **Speed**: Custom research projects delivered in ~5 days versus the traditional multi-week timeline.

## Strategic Focus
Qualitate is focused on replacing fragmented, multi-vendor primary research workflows with a single AI-native platform. The company is scaling its AI moderator capability to run hundreds of interviews per project, moving from qualitative “outlier opinions” to quantitative, time-series market signals. Growth priorities include deepening coverage across financial services and enterprise verticals, and expanding the engineering and intelligence operations teams.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Highly collaborative, fast-shipping environment with “big ambition” – described as building a new category of primary research.
- **Work Model**: On-site in New York City (all current open roles are listed as “OnSite”).
- **Team Composition**: Small but growing (25 people) with heavy influence from top expert networks (GLG, AlphaSights, CB Insights) and data companies (YipitData, Gartner).
- **Impact**: Every team member directly shapes the mission; roles span engineering, intelligence operations, sales, and product design.
- **Current openings**: Staff Software Engineer, Founding Head of Talent, multiple Account Executives (Enterprise, Financial Services, Hedge Funds, Credit Funds), and Intelligence Operations Associate – all New York City based.

## Sources
1. [qualitate.io](https://qualitate.io/)
2. [qualitate.io/about-us](https://qualitate.io/about-us)
3. [qualitate.io/careers](https://qualitate.io/careers)
4. [qualitate.io/product](https://qualitate.io/product)
5. [linkedin.com/company/qualitate-io](https://www.linkedin.com/company/qualitate-io)

## Other roles at Qualitate

- [Growth Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketer-qualitate-new-york-s3py84dr43kv) — New York, NY
- [RevOps Director](https://feeny.ai/job/revops-director-qualitate-new-york-3zrapz2sp0ye) — New York, NY
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-qualitate-new-york-dtf8wc8bew7f) — New York, NY
- [Research Analyst - Generalist](https://feeny.ai/job/research-analyst-generalist-qualitate-new-york-9z9aq9wx0zfx) — New York, NY
- [Lead Research Analyst - Industrials](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-research-analyst-industrials-qualitate-new-york-jf86rqnfw7s9) — New York, NY
- [Lead Research Analyst - Healthcare](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-research-analyst-healthcare-qualitate-new-york-w9s09bdfasrw) — New York, NY
- [Research Analyst - Energy](https://feeny.ai/job/research-analyst-energy-qualitate-new-york-3sh4e34ra215) — New York, NY
- [Lead Research Analyst - Semiconductors & Technology Hardware](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-research-analyst-semiconductors-technology-hardware-qualitate-new-york-arkttb87pj5b) — New York, NY
- [Lead Research Analyst - Data, Cloud & AI](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-research-analyst-data-cloud-ai-qualitate-new-york-x9t2ttatta9e) — New York, NY
- [Senior Product Manager, Expert Community](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-expert-community-qualitate-new-york-bw3xrx98txfk) — New York, NY