Senior Engineer, Applied AI

About this role

Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our growing team.

Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder.

Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items. We employ more than 3000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, the UK, and France.

As part of our interview process, we request that candidates have their cameras on during video interviews. This helps foster meaningful conversation and allows us to create an experience that closely resembles our standard working environment. Certain interview steps may take place by phone. For remote roles, and at our discretion, candidates may be asked to participate in an on-site interview as part of the final stages of the process.

We understand there may be occasional circumstances requiring accommodation and are happy to discuss them as needed. Your recruiter will be able to clarify expectations and answer any questions you have.

We're transforming the collecting experience with technology that brings authentication, grading, and trading into the modern era. Our products are equalizing the playing field by providing tools that make complex research analytics (including pricing, scarcity reports, and historic sales data) accessible to every collector, old or new. Our engineering mission is to democratize technology while promoting innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning throughout the organization.

We're looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to join the Applied AI function at Collectors. This is an embedded, build-first role: you'll sit inside our business teams, find the highest-value problems, and build and ship AI solutions that solve them end-to-end. You'll prototype fast, define success in business terms, and own your work from first demo to measured impact.

This is not a traditional software engineering role. We're looking for product-minded builders who can speak the language of the business, deploy AI in the real world, and prove the value they create. You'll have the backing of a principal engineer for deep technical guidance and a platform team for shared infrastructure, so you can stay focused on outcomes.

You'll report to the Head of Applied AI. Remote or hybrid candidates will also be considered. We believe that there is significant value in in-person collaboration.

What You'll Do

• Embed within a specific business function and find the highest-value problems. You'll sit alongside the people doing the work, learning their workflows deeply enough to spot where AI can take out real cost, time, or friction.

• Go from problem to working prototype in days. You build fast and put something usable in front of real users quickly, then iterate from there rather than disappearing into a long spec.

• Define success up front and prove it. You instrument the outcome before you build, agree the metric with your stakeholder, and come back with evidence of the value delivered in business terms.

• Build and ship AI solutions end-to-end. Own the full arc from discovery and prototype through production, adoption, and measured impact, including the agents, integrations, and interfaces that make it real.

• Operate as a power user of frontier AI. Use Claude, OpenAI, and our orchestration platform daily as your primary tools for building leverage, and bring a strong point of view on how best to apply them.

• Lean on deep technical guidance rather than reinvent it. Partner with our principal engineer and platform team for architecture and shared infrastructure, so your energy stays on the use case and the outcome.

• Win trust and drive adoption. Bring skeptical stakeholders along, navigate messy and sometimes-resistant environments, and make sure what you build actually gets used and sticks.

• Communicate across the gap. Translate fluently between operators, engineers, and leadership, and present impact in the language each audience cares about.

• Raise the people around you. Share what works, review the work of earlier-career builders, and help set the tone for how the team ships.

Who You Are

• A builder, first and foremost. You're passionate about making things, you're happiest hands-on, and you have a strong bias toward shipping over deliberating.

• Product-minded. You start from the business outcome, scope ruthlessly, and define what success looks like before you write code.

• You've shipped an end-to-end agent. You've deployed at least one agentic or AI-powered solution to real users, and you can speak concretely about the value it delivered, the tools you used, and the trade-offs you made along the way.

• A power user of AI. You use Claude, OpenAI, or similar models daily and fluently, and you push them harder than most of the people around you.

• Fluent at turning business pain into working software. You're comfortable embedded inside non-technical teams, and you can translate an operator's frustration into a scoped, shippable solution.

• Technically capable across the stack. You can prototype full-stack, wire up APIs, and build agents independently. You don't need to be the deepest systems engineer in the room (we have a principal engineer for that) but you ship on your own.

• Outcome-obsessed. You talk in metrics and business value, not feature lists, and you measure whether what you built actually moved the number.

• Resilient and trust-building. You thrive in ambiguous, fast-changing environments,

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