AI Design Engineer

SeekWell is the parent company of 1-800 Contacts, Luna, and The Framery. Our goal is to make it simpler, easier, and more accessible for people to get the vision care they need. We maintain the legendary, award-winning culture 1-800 Contacts started almost 30 years ago and continue to develop innovative, pioneering products and businesses that make consumers cheer. We’re owned by KKR – one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity investment companies. We’ve built an excellent company and changed an industry by putting the customer first, always. The best is yet to come!

We're building toward a future where every customer interaction with vision care is seamless, informed, and genuinely personal. Our design and product teams are early in building the systems that make that possible, and AI is core to how we're getting there. 

The CX Incubator exists to rapidly build and test new concepts for our mobile app before larger investments are made. We're looking for a hands-on Applied AI Design Engineer who combines software engineering, customer-facing applied AI/ML, and strong product and design instincts to turn ambitious customer experience ideas into working prototypes. 

You'll work alongside a marketer and designer to take concepts from ideation to realistic, testable simulations and prototypes. You'll build customer-facing experiences that apply and integrate AI technologies, including conversational AI, content decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative experiences, and voice interactions. 

You'll also use AI-native development tools and workflows to move quickly from idea to working simulations and prototypes. This role isn't simply about using AI to code faster; it's about understanding, evaluating, and applying AI technologies to solve real customer problems and independently figuring out how to turn early concepts into working POCs. 

This is a role for a builder who is comfortable with ambiguity, enjoys creating working solutions quickly, and learns through experimentation. 

• →Turn ideas, customer problems, and hypotheses into working prototypes, starting with our mobile app.
• →Build AI-powered experiences using LLMs, AI/ML services, APIs, customer and product data, and modern web and mobile app technologies.
• →Research, evaluate, and prototype with AI models, services, and capabilities to determine the right approach for customer use cases such as content and intelligent decisioning, recommendations, personalization, generative content, conversational AI, and voice experiences.
• →Independently determine the technical approach needed to take loosely defined AI-powered concepts from idea to working, testable POC.
• →Create realistic customer simulations that can be tested with internal and external audiences.
• →Explore how to ground, guide, and evaluate AI experiences using customer profile data, customer context, and human-defined guardrails.
• →Connect prototypes to content libraries, AI SDKs, and staging systems.
• →Contribute reusable AI and application capabilities to our prototyping platform.
• →Use AI-native development workflows with tools like Cursor, Claude, Copilot, and similar technologies.
• →Help define practical guardrails for safe, reliable, and brand-appropriate customer-facing AI experiences. 

• Strong software engineering skills with experience building web or native mobile applications using React, Angular, or similar frameworks. Experience with iOS development is a plus.
• Hands-on experience integrating and applying AI technologies, models, or services within applications, prototypes, or customer experiences.
• Experience working with applied AI technologies such as LLMs, conversational AI, recommendation or decisioning systems, personalization, retrieval/grounding, agents, or generative AI.
• Demonstrated ability to independently take an ambiguous AI-powered concept, determine how to build it, and deliver a functional POC or prototype.
• Strong ability to move from an ambiguous idea or design concept to working software quickly.
• Experience integrating APIs, cloud services, data sources, and external systems.
• Familiarity with AI-native development tools such as Cursor, Claude, Copilot, or similar technologies.
• Strong product and design instincts and an appreciation for great customer experiences.
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration.
• Portfolio, prototypes, side projects, or examples that demonstrate curiosity and self-directed building.