Today - 05 Sep
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Founding AI Engineer / Lead Applied AI Engineer
Batumi
Application information
Email: georgia@alphanavigation.com
Information about vacant position:
- Specialization/Specialty: Information technologies
Programming/Engineering, Software Development, Back-end Development, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - Industry / Field: Transportation, Logistics & Supply Chain
Maritime - Seniority level: Senior-Level
- Schedule: Full-time
- Employment form: Fixed-term contract
- Work Location: On site
Employer requirement:
- Experience is mandatory: Experience from 5 years
- Specialization/Specialty(Mandatory):Information technologies
Programming/Engineering, Software Development, Back-end Development, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - Industry / Field(Mandatory):Transportation, Logistics & Supply Chain
Maritime - Seniority level: Senior-Level
- Minimal educational level: Bachelor, Master, Doctor, College, Other
- Languages: English
ALPHA NAVIGATION is seeking a Founding AI Engineer / Lead Applied AI Engineer
JOB DESCRIPTION
About the company
Alpha Navigation is a maritime crewing and recruitment company. We help shipowners and ship managers recruit, place, and support qualified seafarers. Alongside our crewing operations, we develop digital tools that streamline recruitment, crew management, document workflows, and communication.
About the role
Founding AI engineer: you own the AI platform end to end — architecture, build, ship, measure — and set the technical standards the future AI team will inherit. Applied engineering, not research. Development is run agentically with Claude Code (spec-driven sessions, skills, hooks, MCP tooling) on top of an existing PHP/JS codebase; you should treat AI coding agents as a force multiplier and know exactly when not to trust them.
What you will build
- Conversational agents — messenger-native onboarding and assistance flows (WhatsApp Business API, Telegram, and web chat): deterministic state machines with LLM-powered understanding at the edges, resume-on-return, consent gating, instant-value payoff moments.
- Document intelligence — an extraction platform handling many document types (CVs, certificates, licenses, IDs, employment records) in multiple languages and formats, including photos of paper documents: OCR + LLM extraction into enum-constrained schemas, per-field confidence, golden-corpus testing with accuracy as a CI metric.
- Matching & scoring — LLM-assisted query construction over a deterministic search core, relevance ranking, and profile-quality / reliability scoring models with fairness and explainability built in.
- Verification & trust modules — document validity checks and credential verification workflows (verifiable-credentials standards on the roadmap).
- Agentic & platform infrastructure — the shared tool layer (internal MCP services over platform APIs), evaluation harnesses, guardrails (prompt-injection defense, PII handling, GDPR-clean consent logging), and funnel/loop instrumentation. If it isn't measured, it didn't ship.
Requirements
- 5+ years of production software engineering, with strong backend depth (PHP and/or Node.js; part of the job is modernizing around a legacy core).
- Shipped LLM-powered systems in production: tool calling, structured outputs, constrained generation, evaluation pipelines — not prompt experiments.
- Hands-on with agentic development tooling (Claude Code or equivalent) and the judgment to review what it produces.
- Experience with at least two of: conversational/messenger products, document processing / OCR pipelines, search & ranking systems, ML scoring models.
- Strong instincts for data quality and testing: state machines, golden corpora, regression suites for non-deterministic systems.
- Comfortable as the first specialist in a domain: choosing the stack, writing the standards, mentoring as the team grows.
- Working English.
Nice to have
- Multilingual extraction / NLP; low-quality-input robustness (scans, photos).
- Recruiting, HR-tech, or marketplace product experience.
- Growth/analytics engineering (event schemas, funnel dashboards, experimentation).
- Verifiable credentials (W3C VC) or applied cryptography interest.
Apply with a short note about the most interesting system you've built and a link to code or a write-up.
Interested applicants should send their resume to: georgia@alphanavigation.com
Information technologies
Programming/Engineering,
Software Development,
Back-end Development,
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
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