ML Engineer

ML Engineers: Let 250+ Companies Compete For You

Fonzi is an AI recruiting company.

No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront.

Every week, hiring managers at 250+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about systems, and whether you're the kind of engineer who ships.

Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They're backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.

How It Works

• 5-minute application
• We reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and optimize your profile
• Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want
• Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you
• You only interview where you're genuinely interested
• Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime w/ questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination

Who We're Looking For

The ML engineers who do best on Fonzi:

• Have trained, fine-tuned, evaluated and deployed models in production, not just in notebooks
• Are strong in Python and PyTorch, and comfortable with the data pipelines around models
• Have worked on LLMs (fine-tuning, RL, evals, inference optimization) or classical ML at scale (ranking, recommendations, computer vision)
• Move comfortably between research ideas and production code
• Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small
• Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with experience at at least one high-growth company

What You'll Build

The companies on Fonzi are working on:

• Fine-tuned and domain-specific models for healthcare, legal and fintech
• Eval pipelines and reinforcement learning loops that make models measurably better
• Inference and serving optimization for latency and cost
• Computer vision and perception systems
• Personalization, ranking and recommendation models serving real users

Compensation

• $180,000 to $300,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.

The Interview Process (Typical)

• Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit and genuine curiosity about AI
• Technical deep-dive on modeling choices, evals and a past project
• Coding or pairing session on ML coding, data work or model debugging

If you want your models in production, not stuck in a notebook, we want to hear from you.