Shaped is the fastest path to relevant recommendation and search systems. We help companies turn their behavioral data into truly relevant product and website experiences.

We're a Series A company based in Brooklyn, New York and backed by top investors from Madrona, Y-Combinator, and executives from Meta, Google, Amazon and Uber!

About the job

Shaped is seeking a creative and technically skilled Demo Engineer to join our rapidly growing team. We're an AI-powered SaaS company revolutionizing how businesses deliver engaging user experiences through cutting-edge search & recommendation technology. As we scale, we need a talented individual to build compelling demos that showcase the power and versatility of Shaped's platform to prospective clients and the wider market.

As a Demo Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of showcasing our technology, working closely with our sales and marketing teams to create innovative and engaging demos. You'll have the opportunity to experiment with the latest AI techniques, leverage your skills in data scraping, preparation, and prototyping, and apply your keen eye for design. If you're passionate about AI, love building things, and have a knack for communicating complex technical concepts in a clear and engaging way, we want to hear from you.

What You’ll Be Doing

Demo Development (60% of your time)

• Design and build high-impact demos that showcase the capabilities of Shaped's recommendation and search platform.
• Experiment with cutting-edge AI techniques, including large language models.
• Work with the sales team to understand customer needs and tailor demos to specific use cases and industries.

Data Preparation (20% of your time)

• Identify and acquire datasets for use in demos, utilizing web scraping techniques and other data collection methods where appropriate.
• Clean, transform, and prepare data for ingestion into the Shaped platform.

Communication & Collaboration (20% of your time)

• Actively participate in the AI/ML community, sharing knowledge, insights, and best practices related to search and recommendation systems.
• Work with the marketing team to create content for blog posts, social media, webinars, and other marketing materials.
• Present demos to prospective clients, partners, and at industry events.
• Provide feedback to the product and engineering teams based on demo development experience and customer interactions.
• Document demo development process and best practices.

Experience

What We're Looking For:

• 3+ years of professional experience in a software engineering, data engineering, or technical role, with a focus on building demos, prototypes, or internal tools.
• Strong experience with Python and JavaScript.
• Experience with data scraping, cleaning, and preparation.
• Familiarity with web development technologies (HTML, CSS, React or similar frameworks).

Skills & Capabilities

• Creativity & Innovation: A passion for exploring new technologies and finding creative ways to showcase their value.
• Technical Proficiency: Strong programming skills and a solid understanding of AI/ML concepts.
• Design Sense: An eye for aesthetics and user experience, with the ability to create visually appealing and intuitive demos.
• Data Wrangling: Experience with data acquisition, cleaning, and transformation.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Prototyping & Experimentation: Ability to quickly build and iterate on prototypes to test new ideas and demonstrate feasibility.

Nice-to-Have

• Familiarity with recommendation systems and search technologies.
• Experience using large language models and other advanced AI techniques.
• A keen understanding of design and user experience principles as applied to demo creation.
• Prior experience in customer-facing or sales engineering role.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Benefits:
  • Unlimited PTO with flexible time-off policies
  • Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision)
  • 401K plan
• Equity in a fast-growing, Series A company

Why Join Our Team?

• Work alongside our founding team of AI veterans from Meta, Google, Uber, and Amazon as we make state-of-the-art AI for recommendations and search accessible to all businesses.
• Be at the forefront of AI innovation and help shape the future of personalized experiences.
• Join our in-person team in Brooklyn, NY
• Be part of a company backed by leading investors, including Madrona and Y-Combinator

This role offers a unique opportunity to combine your technical skills with your creativity and communication abilities to make a significant impact on Shaped's growth. The right candidate will have a passion for building, a love for learning, and a desire to be part of a dynamic and innovative team.

Customers typically use Shaped as follows:

1. Connect your data stack, e.g. data warehouse, database or analytics applications
2. Define your model. This includes your optimization objective (e.g. clicks vs purchases vs shares), item and user catalogs, feature types and model types.
3. Consume your results from our real-time, scalable ranking endpoints
4. Evaluate uplift and model results on our dashboard.

To power all of this, under the hood, we've built a multi-tenanted, real-time machine learning architecture which automatically sets-up and ingests data both in real-time and batch, transforms data and stores it into our proprietary feature/vector store. Ranking models are continuously optimized and fine-tuned based on real-time feedback ensuring customers are seeing the most relevant and up-to-date results possible.

From a machine-learning perspective we use state-of-the-art large scale neural encoding models to understand multi-modal data types such as image, text, audio and tabular data. We provide an exhaustive library of retrieval, ranking and ordering algorithms which are selected based on the specified model definition.

We use both AWS and GCP for cloud. Kubernetes for serverless infrastructure. Python, Javascript and Rust for languages.