Senior AI Engineer

About Us

Cambium is a growth stage start-up using technology to make it easy to access material we normally waste, turning salvaged lumber into Carbon Smart Wood™. We recently closed a $18.5M Series A funding round to make it easier to buy, sell, and move fiber across the supply chain. In addition to being named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024, we serve clients like Amazon, Equinox, Room & Board, and other leading brands in the construction, design, and furniture industries. It’s an exciting time of growth for Cambium, and we’re looking for ambitious, energetic people to join our mission.

About This Role

As a Senior AI Engineer at Cambium, you’ll help lead the integration of AI and machine learning across both our external products and internal operations. You’ll prototype and validate applied AI use cases—from forecasting and summarization to generative UI and semantic search—collaborating closely with software engineers to bring those prototypes to production. In parallel, you’ll play a central role in helping Cambium become an AI-native organization: enabling teammates across departments to adopt and benefit from AI tooling, building lightweight internal apps, and leading training and implementation initiatives. This role is ideal for someone with deep expertise in ML and LLMs, who is excited by both the hands-on design of AI systems and the human impact of AI inside a growing startup.

What You’ll Do Here

• Design and prototype AI-powered product features, including search and discovery tools, data classifiers, forecasting models, summarization engines, and generative UI components.

• Evaluate and integrate third-party LLM services and tools (e.g. OpenAI, Hugging Face, vector DBs, agent frameworks) to rapidly test and scale intelligent features.

• Collaborate with PMs, designers, and software engineers to translate prototypes into production-grade implementations.

• Own the internal AI enablement roadmap, including building lightweight tools, guiding workflow automation, and educating teams across Cambium on how to use AI effectively.

• Act as an internal consultant and hands-on partner to departments like Sales, Supply, and Marketing, helping them unlock value from AI in their day-to-day work.

• Stay abreast of developments in generative AI and machine learning and evaluate which emerging tools, frameworks, and patterns are worth bringing into Cambium’s stack.

• Represent Cambium’s AI approach in cross-functional, customer-facing, and leadership conversations.

Your Skill Sets and Capabilities Include

• 4-5+ years of professional experience working on applied AI/ML problems, with demonstrated expertise in prototyping and deploying models and workflows.

• Experience working with or integrating LLMs and associated tooling (e.g., OpenAI APIs, Hugging Face, LangChain / LangGraph, Pinecone, Weaviate, etc.).

• Experience building and deploying high performance deep-learning models using either Tensorflow or PyTorch on significant complexity industrial/commercial datasets.

• Ability to scope and deliver end-to-end AI prototypes, with strong intuitions around data prep, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation.

• ⁠Experience with AI SDKs and building enterprise-grade systems utilizing different AI technologies and providers.

• A strong understanding of ML fundamentals and real-world constraints—model choice, latency, interpretability, privacy, failure modes, etc.

• Skilled at distilling technical topics to non-technical stakeholders and leading effective enablement efforts (training, documentation, tool handoffs).

• Highly collaborative: thrives in multi-stakeholder environments and knows how to bridge product, engineering, and operations through AI.

• Bonus experience: intelligent agent frameworks, geospatial AI, sustainability tech, or ML applications in supply chains or logistics.

The Details

This role will report to: Patrick Coughran, VP of Engineering

Salary Range: $160,000–$190,000

When: Immediately

Where: Hybrid based in the SF Bay Area, CA. Very flexible 2-3 days in our beautiful Pesidio, SF office.

Benefits and Perks

• Equity options package

• Unlimited PTO and flexible schedule

• 401k matching

• Comprehensive medical, dental & vision insurance

• Work with an incredibly smart, diverse, climate mission-driven team

• An opportunity to play a core role in defining our fast-growing company

• Volunteer tree planting days

  
  
  

Cambium is committed to building an inclusive organization that reflects the diverse communities our team works to serve. We believe that diversity in all its forms (gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, veteran’s status, disability and more) is essential to imagining and actively building a more just and sustainable future for all. We hope you feel welcome here.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.