Senior Applied AI Engineer

About Aboon

Setting up a 401(k) shouldn't be the hardest thing a business ever does. But retirement plan administration is complex, fragmented, and manual — and it slows down both business owners and the advisors who serve them. Aboon was founded to change that.

We're an AI-native third-party administrator (TPA) that makes it easy for advisors to offer 401(k)s and other retirement products by pairing streamlined workflows with dedicated human service. Backed by leading investors including Bain Capital and Edward Jones Ventures, we bring decades of experience building for advisors and the retirement industry. We're looking for exceptional, mission-driven people to build it with us.

About the role

Most retirement plan work begins with messy, fragmented inputs gathered from multiple sources, including employee census files, prior plan documents, payroll files, recordkeeper forms, distribution forms, and emails between advisors and business owners. Plan administrators have to review, parse, and validate these materials, then determine what actions to take. The work is time-consuming, and mistakes can be costly.

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer at Aboon, you'll build and operate the agent systems that handle this work. You'll develop systems to extract and validate data from PDFs and spreadsheets, connect agents to recordkeeper, payroll, and internal systems, and keep workflows reliable when inputs are incomplete or steps fail. You'll own your systems from design through evaluation, deployment, and ongoing improvement in production. You’ll shape how we build with AI through the systems you ship and the standards you set.

You'll be a hands-on individual contributor, reporting to our Head of Engineering and working closely with engineers and retirement plan experts who understand the rules and edge cases.

What you’ll do

• Turn messy inputs into reliable data. Extract and validate structured data from census files, plan documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets to support plan design, onboarding, and compliance.

• Build agents that complete workflows. Design systems that use tools and external services, track state, recover from failures, and hand off to a person when needed.

• Measure quality. Build evaluation datasets, regression tests, and production monitoring so you can track quality over time and catch problems before users do.

• Decide where AI belongs. Choose between a model, deterministic code, retrieval, or human review based on what each step needs, and explain the tradeoffs.

• Make production systems cheaper, faster, and more reliable. Reduce failures, latency, and cost, and make systems easier for the team to understand and debug.

• Raise the bar for the team. Write design docs, review code, and help other engineers build and test high-quality AI features.

Who you are

• You work well with non-technical experts. Much of this job is sitting with plan administrators, learning how they make decisions, and turning that into workflows and agents.

• You write clearly. Design docs, code reviews, and explaining tradeoffs to people outside engineering are a real part of the role.

What you bring

Required

• 6+ years building and running production software, with clear ownership of technical decisions and what happened after launch.

• You've shipped an LLM- or agent-powered system that people used in a real workflow. You can explain what you built, how you measured quality, and what you changed when it failed.

• Experience testing system behavior with tests, evaluation datasets, production monitoring or structured human review.

• You reason about state, retries, fallbacks, permissions, latency and cost, not just model outputs.

• You're comfortable integrating with external systems and working with both structured and unstructured data.

• You've led the technical design of a significant system, and other engineers relied on your design docs and code reviews.

• You can take an unclear problem, scope a practical solution, explain the tradeoffs, and see it through implementation and iteration.

Nice to have

• Experience with document extraction, OCR, or images and other non-text inputs.

• Experience with multi-step agent workflows, tool use, or automation with human review.

• Experience in a regulated or high-trust domain (finance, healthcare, insurance, legal).

• Experience owning systems at an early-stage company.

• We build with Python, Agno, Anthropic models (AWS Bedrock). Experience with them helps but isn't required.

Retirement plan experience is not required. You’ll learn the domain on the job.

What we offer

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $220,000 - $240,000, depending on experience, skills, and location. Total compensation also includes an annual bonus and equity.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, with additional optional coverage

• 401(k) with company match

• Flexible paid time off and holidays

• 10 weeks paid parental leave

• A fully remote work environment, with all the technology and equipment you need

• Support for professional development and career growth

Location

Remote, though we encourage in-person attendance at 1-2 company retreats per year.

This role is open to candidates based in the US. Work authorization required; no visa sponsorship.

Aboon is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage applications from all qualified individuals and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status.