AI/Machine Learning Engineer

Backend: Flask 3 + Celery + PostgreSQL + Redis. You’ll contribute here too - nobody on a small team only works on one thing.

Strong Python - reading datasets, writing clean scripts, debugging what’s breaking

• Strong math fundamentals. Linear algebra, probability, statistics - at a level where fine-tuning concepts make intuitive sense. You don’t need a PhD; you need to not be lost when you read a model card or a paper.

• You’ve done something real with LLMs or ML hands-on - even as a personal project. Fine-tuning a model, building with a Hugging Face model, training a classifier, running inference on open weights. Personal projects count fully.

• High curiosity and comfort with ambiguity. We will not hand you a spec. You’ll read papers, try things, and report back what worked.

• Willingness to be in-office in Webb City, MO (near Joplin) full-time. No relocation support is provided.

Nice-to-have:

• Any hands-on experience with open-source model fine-tuning, even hobbyist-level

• Backend engineering experience in Python (web frameworks, APIs, async workers)

• eBay, reselling, or e-commerce experience. Understanding what makes a good listing means you make better decisions about training data quality.

• Recent CS, math, statistics, or engineering degree - we value strong fundamentals over years of experience

We don’t care about:

• Prior job titles or years of industry experience

• Whether you’ve worked in AI professionally - strong self-taught depth and real projects count just as much

• Research credentials or publications

What the work environment looks like

• Small team, real production AI at meaningful scale - thousands of listings generated daily for active users

• High learning environment - access to AI tools, compute resources, and a founder actively building alongside you

Pulled from the full job description

• Paid time off
• Paid holidays, Comp: $65,000-$80,000 based on experience + 2 weeks paid time off + paid federal holidays

Start date: As soon as the right person is available

About Spadeberry

Spadeberry is a profitable software company that helps eBay resellers create and publish better listings faster. Our core feature: sellers upload photos, our AI generates optimized titles, descriptions, item specifics, and pricing suggestions, and we publish directly to eBay (and now Depop, Poshmark, Mercari). The AI is the product.

We’re a small, profitable team and we’re investing in building our own fine-tuned open-source models to supplement our current AI pipeline. That’s a major focus area for this hire - but it’s not the whole job. You’ll contribute across the product as needed, and the problems you’re working on will shift as the company does.

What you’ll work on

AI and model work:

• We have millions of real published eBay listings generated from our users’ photos - titles, descriptions, item specifics. That’s real training data.

• Fine-tuning open-source base models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen, or whatever fits) to generate comparable quality output to our current AI pipeline. Training data curation, cleaning, evaluation, and deployment into production.

• Prompt engineering and context design across multiple eBay categories and item types

• Building evaluation pipelines - quantifying when generation quality improves or degrades

• Running experiments: A/B testing different model approaches against each other

General product engineering:, $65,000-$80,000 base salary based on experience + 2 weeks PTO + paid federal holidays, Pay: $65,000.00 - $80,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Paid time off