Join a well-funded early-stage AI startup as an AI Engineer working on LLMs, Voice AI, Multimodal systems. High ownership role with direct founder collaboration.

About the Company

Tribe Catalyst is hiring on behalf of a well-funded early-stage AI startup based in Bangalore, HSR Layout. The startup is founded by alumni of top IITs and aims to build cutting-edge AI products across voice, language, and multimodal domains. With a lean founding team of 5 members and strong financial backing, they offer a rare opportunity to work directly with founders and shape the core AI stack from day one. The company culture emphasizes ownership, technical excellence, and rapid iteration.

Role Overview

We are looking for an AI Engineer to join the early engineering team. This is a high-ownership role where you will work across the entire AI layer—Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI, AI evaluation, voice AI, multimodal reasoning, and personalization. You will architect and deploy production-grade AI systems, collaborate closely with the founders on product and technical decisions, and take substantial ownership of building AI systems from the ground up. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced startup environment, solves complex technical problems, and enjoys the end-to-end product lifecycle from idea to deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, and maintain production-grade AI/ML systems.
• Develop applications powered by Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Design and implement agentic AI workflows and autonomous agents.
• Work on Voice AI systems including natural voice interactions, speech recognition, and synthesis.
• Explore and build solutions involving multimodal reasoning (text, image, audio, video).
• Create robust AI evaluation pipelines to monitor and improve system quality and reliability.
• Contribute to AI personalization and product intelligence features.
• Solve complex technical problems spanning the AI and product stack.
• Work closely with founders on core AI and product decisions.
• Take substantial ownership of building and improving AI systems from the ground up.

Tech Stack

• Large Language Models (LLMs): GPT, LLaMA, Claude, or open-source models; prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG.
• Agentic AI: Frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, or custom agent orchestration.
• Voice AI: ASR, TTS, voice activity detection, conversational voice interfaces (e.g., Whisper, ElevenLabs, Deepgram).
• Multimodal Reasoning: Integrating vision, language, and audio models for cross-modal understanding.
• AI Evaluation & Reliability: Metrics, testing frameworks, A/B testing, hallucination detection.
• Infrastructure: Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Personalization: Recommendation systems, embedding-based retrieval, user profiling.

Why Join?

• Direct access to founders with zero management layers.
• Be part of a small founding AI engineering team with outsized impact.
• Significant technical ownership from day one.
• Build AI systems from the ground up rather than maintaining legacy code.
• Contribute directly to core AI and product decisions.
• Hands-on exposure across LLMs, agentic AI, voice AI, multimodal reasoning, and AI applications.
• Competitive compensation of up to ₹50 LPA CTC plus health insurance, life insurance, and leave encashment.

If you are an AI engineer ready to shape the future of an early-stage AI startup, we'd love to hear from you.

2-5 years experience in AI/ML engineering. Must be graduate of top 10 IIT with JEE rank below 5,000. Startup experience mandatory. Hands-on with LLMs, agentic AI, voice AI, multimodal AI. Production-grade system building skills.

Health insurance, life insurance, leave encashment. Competitive compensation up to ₹50 LPA CTC based on experience and skills.