Applied AI & Automation Engineer

Role Overview

SolarRun is seeking a hands-on Applied AI & Automation Engineer to build practical AI capabilities across CRM operations, Sales, Marketing, Lead Generation, Content, and Customer Operations.

The role will work closely with the Product Manager, business teams, and existing PHP/Laravel developers to identify business problems, evaluate the right technology approach, prototype solutions, and take successful solutions into production.

The ideal candidate should have a strong software engineering foundation combined with practical experience in modern AI, LLMs, automation, and agentic workflows.

What You Will Build

CRM & Operations

• Develop AI-powered workflows within the custom PHP/Laravel CRM.
• Automate processing of leads, customer information, project data, documents, emails, and operational workflows.
• Build CRM assistants, information extraction/classification systems, project support tools, and internal knowledge assistants.

Sales AI & Training

• Build AI-based sales coaching and training agents.
• Develop role-play agents for customer scenarios and objection handling.
• Analyze sales-call transcripts to identify objections, buying signals, recommended actions, and performance insights.
• Automate sales summaries and CRM updates.

Marketing AI

• Develop AI workflows for campaign ideation, customer research, marketing briefs, content creation, landing pages, messaging, and SEO.
• Build marketing knowledge-retrieval and reporting workflows.
• Support campaign optimization and insight generation.

Lead Generation & Qualification

• Build lead enrichment, classification, qualification, and scoring workflows.
• Develop intelligent lead routing and high-intent opportunity identification.
• Automate follow-ups and re-engagement of older leads.
• Integrate advertising platforms, websites, and CRM systems.

Content Generation

• Build controlled AI content workflows for social media, blogs, landing pages, email campaigns, advertisements, sales collateral, and customer communications.
• Implement brand-aware content generation with evaluation and human approval.
• Support content repurposing, localization, and scalable franchise-specific content.

Core Responsibilities

• Work with Product and business stakeholders to identify business problems and determine whether the appropriate solution is conventional automation, predictive ML, Generative AI, RAG, an AI agent, or a combination.
• Prototype, test, and productionize successful AI and automation solutions.
• Integrate Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and other LLMs through APIs.
• Build tool/function-calling and single- or multi-step agentic workflows.
• Integrate AI services with the PHP/Laravel CRM using REST APIs, webhooks, authentication, and structured JSON.
• Build workflow automations using n8n or similar orchestration platforms.
• Implement RAG, embeddings, and vector search where appropriate.
• Design structured outputs, validation, guardrails, retries, fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Develop AI evaluation and testing frameworks to measure accuracy, quality, and reliability.
• Implement logging, observability, API/model cost tracking, and failure handling.
• Ensure appropriate security, privacy, and customer-data protection across AI solutions.
• Document architecture, APIs, prompts, workflows, and technical decisions.

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

• Strong software engineering background.
• Python and/or Node.js/TypeScript.
• REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, and authentication.
• SQL and relational databases.
• Experience with LLM APIs such as Claude, OpenAI, and/or Gemini.
• Experience building production LLM-powered applications.
• Tool/function calling and agentic workflows.
• Prompt/context engineering and structured outputs.
• AI evaluation and testing.
• Git and production deployment practices.
• Understanding of security, privacy, and data protection.

Highly Desirable

• n8n or similar workflow orchestration tools.
• RAG, embeddings, and vector search.
• Vector databases such as pgvector, Pinecone, Qdrant, or Weaviate.
• Agent frameworks and orchestration.
• LLM observability and monitoring.
• Traditional ML / predictive modelling.
• AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Docker and CI/CD.
• PHP/Laravel integration experience.
• CRM/ERP/accounting integrations.
• Marketing technology integrations.
• Transcription/speech AI.

Engineering Mindset

We are looking for someone who thinks business problem first, AI second.

The candidate should be able to assess when a deterministic workflow and API integration would be more reliable, cost-effective, and maintainable than an AI agent. Where AI genuinely adds value through language understanding, reasoning, knowledge retrieval, or multi-step execution, the candidate should be capable of designing and deploying the solution responsibly.

What We Look For

For relevant projects, candidates should be able to explain:

• The business problem being solved.
• Why AI was selected over conventional automation.
• Why a particular model and architecture were chosen.
• Whether the solution used AI agents, RAG, predictive ML, or conventional workflows.
• Systems and platforms integrated with the solution.
• How accuracy and quality were evaluated.
• How hallucinations, failures, and exceptions were handled.
• Security and privacy considerations.
• Whether the solution reached production.
• The measurable business outcome delivered.

Working demos, architecture diagrams, GitHub projects, and case studies will be highly valued.

Role Positioning

This role is not primarily a:

• Prompt Engineer
• Data Scientist / Research role
• Front-End Developer
• Generic PHP Developer
• Chatbot-only Developer
• No-code-only Automation Specialist

We are looking for an engineer who combines strong production software engineering with modern applied AI and automation capabilities.