***LOCAL CANDIDATES ONLY***
This is a full-time, in-office position. Candidates must be able to commute daily.
AI Engineer - Platform Intelligence
Location: Issaquah, WA 98027
Compensation: $60/hour
About Nukleus
Nukleus is the career operating system for professional athletes — a single platform where contracts, financial data, NIL deals, social performance, and the entire ecosystem of advisors surrounding an athlete live together. We are building infrastructure that has never existed in professional sports, at a moment when the industry is ready for it. Our platform is live, our NFLPA and NBPA NDAs are signed, and we are growing fast. The data we are accumulating — across contracts, compensation, deal structures, social reach, and financial performance — represents an asset that no one in the industry has built before. This role exists to unlock it.
The Role
We are looking for an AI engineer who thinks in possibilities, not limitations. We have mapped out our AI based initiatives and we need the right engineer to walk in, evaluate what we have planned, and own the implementation. That means you may validate the architecture and execute it, or you may identify a better path and make the case for it. Either outcome is the right one. What we are not looking for is someone who simply executes instructions. We want an engineer with enough conviction and experience to push back when it matters and build with confidence when the direction is right.
Your mandate also extends to the entire platform. You will look at every feature we have built — contract management, financial tracking, NIL deal flow, social metrics, the Collab Hub, agent and advisor workflows — and ask what becomes possible when intelligence runs through all of it. You will use the proprietary data we store to create experiences that feel less like software and more like having the smartest analyst in professional sports sitting next to you at all times. You should have strong technical fundamentals, genuine excitement about what AI can do right now, and the creativity to imagine applications that nobody has thought of yet.
What We Are Looking For
- Proven experience shipping AI-powered features in production — RAG pipelines, LLM integrations, or agent systems used by real people at scale, not demos or prototypes
- Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI), embedding-based search, and RAG architecture — including chunking strategy, retrieval evaluation, and prompt engineering for structured outputs
- Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals — you are comfortable in React on the frontend and can own backend logic in TypeScript/Node, Supabase Edge Functions, and Postgres
- Experience building data pipelines over mixed structured and unstructured data — PDF extraction, JSON normalization, and vector storage — and a disciplined approach to evaluating model outputs over time
- A genuine product instinct — you know when AI adds real value versus when it is noise, and you are willing to make that call even when it means building less
- Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders — founders, athlete partners, and sports industry advisors who care about outcomes, not architecture diagrams
- Self-directed and entrepreneurial — you surface the next problem before being asked, and you have opinions about what Nukleus should build that you are willing to defend
Bonus Points
- Experience at a company where AI was central to the product, not a bolt-on — ideally a fintech, sports tech, media, or creator economy platform
- Hands-on work with multi-agent architectures or autonomous tool-calling workflows — orchestration, memory, handoff patterns, and the failure modes that come with them
- Understanding of the sports industry — how contracts are structured, how NIL deals work, how athlete brands are valued
- Familiarity with pgvector or dedicated vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate) and the trade-offs between them at different dataset scales
- Experience designing AI features for mobile-first or data-rich SaaS products, with an eye toward latency, streaming responses, and graceful degradation
Why This Role Is Different
Most AI engineering roles give you a spec and ask you to build to it. This one gives you an architecture, asks for your honest assessment, and then hands you the keys. We have done the planning work — the agent design, the data infrastructure, the domain expertise — and we want an engineer who can stress-test what we have built, improve it where needed, and then execute it with full ownership. The data we are accumulating is proprietary, the industry is underserved, and the athletes and advisors who use this platform are going to be shaped by the decisions you make. If you have been looking for a role where your judgment matters as much as your technical ability, this is it.
Why Nukleus
We are an early-stage company with real traction, blue-chip athlete partners, and a product that addresses a genuine gap in a multi-billion dollar industry. You will have direct access to leadership, ownership over what you build, and the satisfaction of seeing your work used by professional athletes and the teams that represent them. Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.
