Senior LLM Engineer

About SmartAsset:

SmartAsset is an online destination for consumer-focused financial information and advice, whose mission is helping people make smart financial decisions, reaching over an estimated 59 million people each month (as of January 2025) through our educational content and personalized calculators and tools. To extend our mission, we also operate SmartAsset Advisor Marketing Platform (AMP), which helps connect consumers with fiduciary financial advisors.SmartAsset has earned recognition on the Inc. 5000 (#2574 in 2023) and Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ (#250 in 2022) lists. Currently, SmartAsset ranks on Y Combinator’s list of Top 100 Companies. A successful $110 million Series D funding round in 2021 valued the company at over $1 billion.

*Other than application and licensing fees, SmartAsset did not provide compensation for the aforementioned awards.

About the team: 

At SmartAsset you will join a team of data scientists, analysts and ML engineers that are at the forefront of AI/ML application for the company. You will have the opportunity to work cross-functionally with leaders from different teams (Marketing, Product, Sales, and Technology), and with our growing Data team.

About the job:

We are seeking an experienced Senior LLM Engineer to join our team and develop high-performance, scalable and reliable LLM capabilities to power SmartAsset’s future. As a key member of our team, you will be responsible for designing and implementing the LLM service and supporting the logic, integrating the services as well as ensuring the performance scalability including handling hundreds of simultaneous users per second. If you are passionate about building high-performance, scalable and reliable LLM service and products and have a track record of delivering solutions in AWS, we would love to hear from you.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement a high-performance, scalable and reliable LLM service using Python, LLM Services (E.g., OpenAI, Antropic’s Claude,Meta’s LLaMA etc) and AWS technologies to power our applications and business needs including building services that can serve hundreds of concurrent users in a second.
• Design and development of RAG pipelines
• Building or integrating Voice related AI technologies and productizing at scale
• Collaborate with business leaders to understand their needs and challenges, and identify potential LLM use cases.
• Design, develop, and deploy custom LLM solutions tailored to the requirements of different divisions, including co-creating the prompts.
• Collaborate with the Data Science team to understand how to build the LLM solution including fine tuning OpenAI models as necessary.
• Implement software best practices to ensure seamless development, testing, and deployment of LLM solutions.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in LLM technologies, and continuously explore ways to integrate these advancements into our existing solutions.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive documentation, including technical specifications, user guides, and best practices.
• Ensure data privacy and security compliance while working with LLMs.
• Provide technical support and training to internal teams as needed.
• Monitor LLM performance and make improvements to ensure acceptable response times based on use cases.
• Collaborate with other developers and data scientists within the organization to share knowledge, ideas, and best practices.
• Participate in code reviews and provide guidance to junior developers.

Skills/Experience you have:

• Proven experience with Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP or Azure)
• Hands-on experience working with Vector databases such as PineCone,Chroma, MongoDB and LanceDB.
• Solid understanding of LLM concepts, such as prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, and transfer learning.
• Familiarity with one popular LLM frameworks (e.g., OpenAI GPT, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Minimum 5 years of experience in Python programming, with a strong focus on developing LLM applications.
• Proven experience with automation and scaling.
• Experience building and/or integrating Voice AI solutions is a big plus.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working in a cross-functional team and collaborating with stakeholders at various levels of the organization.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.
• Experience with DevOps toolsets such as Terraform, Prometheus, etc. and Understanding of Docker,Kubernetes and CI/CD tools such as Gitlab CI,ArgoCD and Helm charts gets you bonus points
• Experience with web frameworks such as FastAPI, Django, Streamlit for  building production ready applications gets you bonus points.

Available Benefits and Perks: 

• All roles at SmartAsset are currently and will remain remote - flexibility to work from anywhere in the Contiguous US.
• Medical, Dental, Vision - multiple packages available based on your individualized needs
• Life/AD&D Insurance - basic coverage at 100% company paid, additional supplemental available 
• Supplemental Short-term and Long-term Disability
• FSA: Medical and Dependant Care 
• 401K
• Equity packages for each role
• Time Off: Vacation, Sick and Parental Leave
• EAP (Employee Assistance Program)
• Financial Literacy Mentoring Program
• Pet Insurance
• Home Office Stipend

SmartAsset is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact us at Recruiting@smartasset.com.

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, Rhode Island, Washington, and New York City residents* Salary range is $135,000-$210,000 + RSUs + benefits depending on experience.

**Salary at SmartAsset is determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location within the contiguous United States.