Senior AI Engineer, Evaluation & Optimization

The posting, as Vantaca wrote it

HOAi is the fastest-growing company revolutionizing the community association management industry. Our AI workforce platform integrates machine learning technology to streamline labor-heavy processes, eliminating inefficiencies and driving scalability. With rapid growth in the AI space, we are pushing boundaries to redefine industry standards. HOAi Agents go beyond traditional AI by proactively executing complex, multi-step processes with human-like reasoning—working autonomously, 24/7, across your entire operation. This transformation optimizes labor costs, enables growth without additional hires, and ensures faster, higher-quality service for residents and board members.

HOAi was acquired by Vantaca in the fall of 2024. Vantaca just achieved unicorn status with a $1.25B valuation, so it's safe to say we're past the "scrappy startup phase." We're not just building a successful company – we're building the category-defining platform that will transform how an entire industry operates.

Here's the reality of our trajectory

• Growing 100% year-over-year
• Our AI product (HOAi) went from $0 to millions in months
• Backed by Cove Hill Partners and JMI Private Equity
• 6M+ doors on our platform, displacing legacy systems

About the Role

We run millions of AI tasks in production and are hiring a Senior AI Engineer, Evaluation & Optimization to own the systems, experiments, and feedback loops that determine how those tasks use AI models.

AI models are improving rapidly, but model capability alone does not determine production performance. Model choice, prompts, context, tool use, routing, retries, and execution design all affect whether a task succeeds and what that success costs.

Your mandate is to maximize successful task completion per dollar while meeting our quality, reliability, and latency requirements. You will build evaluation and observability infrastructure, benchmark models and configurations, analyze production behavior, and translate findings into production improvements. You will also design optimization loops that search for better prompts, model configurations, routing policies, agent strategies, and execution plans.

This is an engineering-heavy, highly empirical role. You will work across model providers, prompts, agent architectures, routing strategies, production traces, and optimization systems to determine what works at scale for our workloads. TypeScript is the primary implementation language.

What You Will Own

Production AI Infrastructure

• Build the infrastructure required to measure, operate, and improve millions of AI tasks reliably.
• Build TypeScript services and libraries for model execution, routing, retries, fallbacks, and structured outputs.
• Instrument AI workflows for quality, latency, reliability, token usage, and cost.
• Create consistent interfaces across model providers and configurations.
• Provide end-to-end traceability across prompts, models, tools, agent steps, retries, and outcomes.

[…]

• 401K with Company Match.
• Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed.
• Great parental leave benefits.
• Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology™ 2026 (Small/Mid).
• Named on Inc 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.
• Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row.
• Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category.
• Active employee-led Culture Committee.
• Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees.
• Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community.
• We’re playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We’re building something cool and people like it here.

The base salary range for this position is $200,000-$260,000/year. Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience and qualifications. Vantaca offers comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance through Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina and Principal; Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts; a 401(k) plan with company match (up to 3% after one year, with Vantaca covering all administrative fees); and at no cost to you: life and short term disability insurance, telemedicine through Teladoc, and an Employee Assistance Program providing 24/7 access to counseling, financial planning, legal services, and family support resources.

We receive many resumes for our open positions and each one is reviewed by a human being on our recruiting team. We will compare your background with the qualifications and requirements for the position.

If you are selected for an interview you will receive an e-mail from someone on our recruiting team with an @vantaca.com email address. It may take some time for us to review all of the applications so give us some time to respond. We appreciate your interest in this role.