Join Us

The Opportunity

Atheon is building the first native advertising platform designed specifically for AI interactions. We're creating the economic layer that will enable the next generation of AI applications to thrive sustainably.

As our Founding Machine Learning Engineer, you'll architect and build the technical foundation that bridges AI experiences with meaningful, contextual advertising. You'll be joining at the ground floor, working directly with the founders to shape both our technology and our culture.

What You'll Build

You'll own the entire technical vision and execution, from infrastructure to product. This includes building real-time ad serving systems that understand context, developing SDK integrations for AI platforms, creating privacy-first user data architecture, and establishing the engineering culture and practices that will scale with our team.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement our core advertising platform architecture, optimized for AI-native interactions
• Build scalable backend systems that handle real-time contextual analysis and ad matching
• Architect ML/AI pipelines for contextual understanding, embedding generation, and semantic matching at scale
• Design and implement Ops infrastructure for model training, deployment, monitoring, and A/B testing
• Create developer-friendly SDKs and APIs that integrate seamlessly with AI applications
• Build inference optimization systems for low-latency AI model serving in production environments
• Build and mentor the engineering team as we grow from zero to one
• Work closely with founders on product direction and company strategy
• Set technical standards, development practices, and security protocols

What We're Looking For

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science with focus on AI/ML, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of machine learning engineering experience with at least 2 years in technical leadership roles
• Deep understanding of machine learning fundamentals, neural networks, and modern LLM architectures (transformers, attention mechanisms, etc.)
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, real-time data processing, and high-scale architectures
• Experience with vector databases, embedding models, and semantic search systems
• Proven track record of building 0-to-1 products in fast-paced environments
• Excellent communication skills and ability to articulate complex technical concepts
• Entrepreneurial mindset with comfort in ambiguity and rapid iteration

Bonus Points

• Experience founding or being an early engineer at a startup
• Experience with fine-tuning, RLHF, or prompt engineering for LLMs
• Contributions to open source AI or infrastructure projects
• Experience building developer tools or platforms
• Understanding of advertising ecosystem and programmatic advertising

Why Atheon