AI Engineer, Applied AI / ML, (Potential Contract to Hire)

Pune, India preferred
Full-time contractor, with potential to transition to FTE

Build close to the problem. Learn the whole system.

SureHost is an early-stage hospitality technology company building new ways for short-term rental operators to run and grow their businesses.

Our technical and AI team is based in Pune. Our customer and product team is based in Des Moines, Iowa. We are building the company across both.

Pune is not a downstream engineering center at SureHost. Our India-based technical leaders are company owners and help shape our architecture, technical direction, and strategy.

We are looking for an AI Engineer who already knows how to build and wants to develop a much broader technical range.

You will work directly with two experienced technical leaders—one with deep AI and architecture expertise and one with broad CTO-level engineering experience—while building systems being shaped by our first paying customers.

This is an individual-builder role.

You will write code. You will ship systems. You will also get close to the customer problems, product decisions, architecture, and technical tradeoffs behind what gets built.

What you’ll build

Our AI work spans video and image analysis, multimodal models, LLMs, agents, evaluation, data, and the services that connect those systems to the product.

You will:

• Build and improve AI/ML systems using Python
• Implement and test LLM, computer-vision, multimodal, and agentic workflows
• Evaluate and integrate open-source models and third-party AI APIs
• Create datasets, evaluation pipelines, and automated tests
• Analyze model outputs and find where accuracy or reliability breaks down
• Build data-processing pipelines, APIs, and backend services
• Take experiments that work in a demo and make them hold up inside a real product
• Debug production problems and improve latency, reliability, and cost
• Work directly with technical leadership as architecture and product decisions are made
• Learn how customer problems become requirements and technical decisions
• Take increasing ownership of systems from initial problem through production

Requirements will change as we learn from customers.

Part of the job is understanding what changed, why it matters, and what should happen next.

What we’re looking for

This role is likely a fit for someone with:

• 2–5 years of software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI experience
• Strong Python development skills
• Practical experience with AI/ML frameworks and APIs
• Experience with LLMs, computer vision, or multimodal AI
• Working knowledge of APIs, databases, Git, testing, and cloud environments
• Experience turning prototypes into maintainable software
• A systematic approach to evaluating AI output—not just deciding whether a demo looks good
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills
• Curiosity about the customer and business problem behind the technical work
• The desire to own more than one narrow layer of a system

Experience deploying AI applications, building agents, working with video or multimodal models, or contributing to production ML systems is a plus.

A different path for an engineer

The goal is not simply to get better at implementing AI features.

It is to develop the judgment to understand what should be built, how the system should be designed, what tradeoffs matter, how it behaves in production, and whether it solves the customer's actual problem.

That happens by staying close to the work.

At SureHost, engineers can move between experimentation, architecture, product questions, production problems, and customer learning because there are very few layers separating them.

You will still be an individual builder.

You will simply get to see—and increasingly own—more of the system around what you build.

What you’re joining

SureHost is working with its first paid customer pilot and preparing for broader U.S. expansion.

That means much of the product still has to be figured out.

For the right engineer, that is the opportunity.

There is no large organization deciding everything upstream and handing implementation downstream. The Pune and U.S. teams work together around the same customer problems and product.

This role begins as a full-time contractor engagement, with the potential to transition into a full-time employee role as SureHost grows.

Build with us

If the goal is to stay inside one narrow technical lane, there are easier places to do that.

If the goal is to understand more of the problem, more of the system, and more of the decisions behind what gets built, we should talk.