Senior AI Engineer

Build a Safer World as a Senior AI Engineer at TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides leading blockchain analytics and AI solutions, empowering law enforcement, national security agencies, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses to detect, investigate, and disrupt crypto-related fraud and financial crime. Our platforms offer advanced intelligence and AI capabilities to trace funds, identify illicit activity, build cases, and gain a comprehensive understanding of evolving threats. Trusted globally, TRM is committed to enabling a safer, more secure world for everyone.

About the AI & Automation Team

The AI & Automation team at TRM is dedicated to designing and building AI-powered applications and agentic solutions that enable our internal teams to operate with exceptional efficiency and scale. We collaborate closely with business leaders across the company to identify high-impact opportunities, then design, build, and maintain end-to-end solutions that demonstrably improve key business metrics.

We are actively seeking a Senior AI Engineer who is passionate about working hands-on with cutting-edge AI technologies, developing custom internal tools, and operating with a high degree of ownership. This role is perfectly suited for engineers who wish to remain deeply technical while also playing a pivotal role in shaping project direction and outcomes.

As a member of our AI & Automation team, you will embed with various business teams—including Intelligence, R&D, Operations, Talent, Finance, and Legal—to understand their most critical challenges. You will then design and implement AI-enabled solutions that drive measurable results. You will own these systems from concept and architecture through delivery, continuous iteration, and long-term maintenance.

The Impact You’ll Have Here

• Design, build, and own full-stack, AI-powered internal applications, encompassing backend services, APIs, data storage, and user-facing interfaces.
• Develop custom agentic solutions utilizing state-of-the-art AI models (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) to automate workflows, enhance decision-making, and scale business processes.
• Embed within internal teams to thoroughly understand their goals, constraints, and key metrics, then translate these needs into robust technical solutions with clear success criteria.
• Own projects comprehensively, including technical design, architectural decisions, scoping, delivery, iteration, and ongoing support.
• Collaborate effectively with non-technical stakeholders to expand their understanding of AI's potential and help them envision more ambitious solutions.
• Build reliable, scalable systems that are adopted across the organization and are integral to TRM’s critical operations.
• Continuously evaluate the impact of solutions, iterating quarter-over-quarter based on measurable business outcomes.
• Contribute to a fast-moving, high-ownership engineering culture that prioritizes quality, velocity, and tangible real-world impact.

What We’re Looking For

• 6+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, specifically building scalable web applications, services, and APIs.
• Proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python, with comfort working across the stack, including frontend development (React or similar frameworks).
• Experience building robust backend systems, working with diverse datastores such as Postgres/pgvector, Pinecone, and Redis, and designing effective APIs.
• Demonstrated curiosity and hands-on experience with AI tools and applications, including modern AI models, agentic IDEs, or building AI-enabled workflows and prototypes.
• Experience building or experimenting with custom-developed agentic systems, workflow orchestration tools (like n8n), or agentic browser automation.
• A high degree of ownership and initiative, with the proven ability to operate independently in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Excellent communication skills, enabling you to clearly explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally and building trust with stakeholders at all organizational levels.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Direct experience integrating automated AI Evaluation/Testing/Observability suites to continuously test model effectiveness, leveraging platforms such as DeepEval, Langfuse/LangSmith, or similar.

About The Team

The AI & Automation team operates on a weekly sprint schedule. Individual team members are empowered to lead projects as technical anchors, fostering growth and ownership aligned with their professional level and goals. We collaborate closely with our internal stakeholders to deliver impactful features to our internal customers and the broader company.

Our team’s culture is founded on psychological safety, where members build strong rapport and trust-based relationships, hold each other to high standards, collaborate extensively, and enjoy working together.

The team’s timezone distribution includes a mix of EST and PST, ensuring at least 6 hours of overlap with PST (8 am to 2 pm PST).

On-Call: We maintain an on-call rotation specifically for internal tools. In this role, the internal tools engineer is responsible for triaging customer support requests originating from dedicated Slack channels pertaining to internal tools.

Life at TRM

We are building a safer world, and this commitment is reflected in our daily work. TRM operates at a very fast pace, characterized by high velocity and high ownership. We expect clarity, thorough follow-through, and significant impact. Individuals who thrive here are energized by complex problems, experimentation, and direct feedback. What might take months elsewhere often ships here in days.

This pace is not for everyone. If your primary optimization is consistent work-life balance, we encourage you to use the interview process to assess the fit. We aim for teammates who truly thrive, not just survive, in our environment.

AI Fluency at TRM

AI fluency is a fundamental expectation at TRM. We believe that AI profoundly transforms how top performers operate, and we expect every team member to leverage AI to accelerate and reimagine their craft, going beyond mere task automation.

At TRM, AI Fluency Means You Are Among The Top 10 Percent Of Operators In Your Function In How You Apply AI To:

• Accelerate repeatable workflows.
• Structure and solve problems.
• Improve output quality.
• Increase speed and leverage.

Your applied AI fluency will be a key evaluation criterion during the interview process.

Leadership Principles

We hire and foster growth based on three core leadership principles that define how we operate, interact, and make decisions:

• Impact-Oriented Trailblazer: We prioritize customers and act with speed, focus, and adaptability. Every plan is treated as an experiment—test, ship, measure, and iterate rapidly.
• Master Craftsperson: We are deeply committed to our craft. We balance speed with high standards, take end-to-end ownership of outcomes, and continuously invest in personal improvement.
• Inspiring Colleague: We contribute clarity and energy, not noise. We bring humility, candor, and a one-team mindset, providing and receiving feedback to strengthen the team.

Interviewing at TRM: How We Hire and What Success Looks Like

The impact you will have in this role carries real stakes. Depending on your responsibilities at TRM, your typical week might involve:

• Driving critical investigations that demand immediate attention.
• Shipping products in days, where others might plan for quarters.
• Collaborating with teams across time zones to deliver insights as events unfold.
• Building novel solutions from first principles when no existing playbook applies.
• Protecting victims and customers by tracing illicit activity and disrupting criminal networks.

Join our Mission

At TRM, we deeply care about our craft. We seek individuals who want their work to truly matter, who experiment with speed and rigor, and who take immense pride in contributing to a safer world for billions of people. If TRM’s mission excites you but you don’t meet every single qualification, we strongly encourage you to apply—we prioritize potential, sound judgment, and a strong will to learn rapidly.

TRM is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by prominent investors including Blockchain Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others. Headquartered in San Francisco, TRM operates as a distributed-first company with established hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.

Key skills/competency

• AI Automation
• Full-stack Development
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Python
• React.js
• PostgreSQL/pgvector
• Pinecone
• API Design
• Agentic Systems
• Machine Learning Models