Senior AI Engineer — Applied AI / ML (Potential Contract to Hire)
Listing checked October 24, 2026 · pay as published by Braintrust
Key details
- Pay
- $25–35/hr
- Location
- Onsite · Pune, INIndia
- Job type
- contract
- Posted
- September 11, 2026
Overview
SureHost is an early-stage hospitality technology company that builds tools for short-term rental operators, with its AI and technical team in Pune and product and customer work running out of Des Moines, Iowa. The India-based technical leaders own part of the company and shape architecture and technical direction. As a Senior AI Engineer you sit with the CTO and architecture leads on systems built around video and image analysis, multimodal models, LLMs, and agentic workflows that solve real customer problems. The hard part arrives after the demo works, when someone has to decide whether a system is accurate, fast, reliable, and cheap enough to serve paying customers.
What You'll Do8
- Build production AI and ML systems in Python, from the first prototype through deployment and monitoring.
- Choose the right approach for each problem: hosted model APIs, open-source models, adaptation work, or plain deterministic code.
- Design evaluation systems that test accuracy, reliability, latency, cost, and known failure modes.
- Write the data pipelines, APIs, and backend services that carry a model into production.
- Own systems through deployment, monitoring, debugging, and the next round of iteration.
- Review code and help less experienced engineers work through difficult technical problems.
- Work with technical leadership on architecture and tradeoffs, and push back on a requirement when a better technical answer exists.
- Improve testing, observability, and documentation so production issues surface early.
Requirements8
- 5 to 8 or more years of software engineering experience, including recent work building AI or ML systems.
- Strong Python skills and solid software engineering fundamentals.
- A record of putting AI systems into production, beyond a working prototype.
- Depth to reason about everything around the model: data, infrastructure, APIs, and backend services.
- Hands-on exposure to LLMs, multimodal models, computer vision, agents, model APIs, or open-source models.
- Judgment about model quality and failure modes, including where a system breaks and what to change.
- Ability to separate what belongs in AI from what should stay deterministic software.
- Comfort building on cloud infrastructure and shipping backend services and APIs.
Preferred Qualifications4
- Experience at an early-stage company
- Video or computer vision work
- Workflow automation projects
- Hospitality technology background
Who Should Apply
The role suits a senior engineer with 5 to 8 years of shipping software who still writes Python and wants to stay close to the code. Bring production AI/ML experience and the judgment to question a model, a dataset, or a requirement when the evidence points elsewhere.
Salary Insight
The engagement pays $25 to $35 per hour. That band matches senior AI contract work in the Indian market, and the role starts as a full-time contractor arrangement with a possible move into employee status as the company grows.
Pay and demand for AI Training roles
Market estimates from live NearSkill listings — separate from this job's published terms.
This role · as published
$25–35/hr
Taken from the listing itself.
Typical pay · estimated
$70/hour
Median of 1,252 similar roles that publish pay · 302 publish only a top rate; those count at the rate they gave
Most AI Training roles pay $40–$95 per hour. This role's pay sits below that range.
Rates shown per hour. Yearly and monthly pay converted; one-time fees and non-USD pay are not included.
- Live similar roles
- 1,424
- Listed in last 30 days
- 750
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- 96%
Hiring most right now: micro1 (390) · SME Careers (253) · Mercor (202)
Most requested skills · share of roles
- ai evaluation13%
- llm evaluation12%
- ai training11%
- data annotation11%
Figures from AI Training roles live on NearSkill when this page loaded. A role can close before you apply, so check the listing itself.
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