ML/AI Engineer

About the Company

Canals builds software for wholesale distributors, helping them operate more efficiently through automation and AI. Our customers are the companies responsible for moving the materials that power the real economy: electrical supplies, plumbing products, roofing materials, HVAC equipment, and more.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy AI-powered product features across core workflows
• Develop and maintain LLM-powered systems, including agents and retrieval pipelines (RAG)
• Build machine learning models for classification, forecasting, anomaly detection, and recommendation systems
• Own the full lifecycle of ML systems: data pipelines, experimentation, training, evaluation, and deployment
• Improve the scalability, reliability, and performance of AI infrastructure and inference systems
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, model evaluation, and cost optimization
• Collaborate with backend engineers to integrate AI systems into product workflows

Requirements

• 4+ years of software engineering experience with significant exposure to ML or applied AI
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building scalable production systems
• Hands-on experience shipping ML or LLM-powered products into production
• Proficiency with Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Scikit-learn)
• Experience with LLM APIs and tooling (OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, or LlamaIndex)
• Familiarity with vector databases and retrieval systems
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for AI quality and reliability
• Strong understanding of API design, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI systems for ERP systems or B2B SaaS
• Experience fine-tuning models or working with open-source LLMs
• Familiarity with document intelligence (OCR, extraction, classification)
• Experience with event-driven architectures and high-volume backend systems