Now in our 31st year, Kellex is one of the largest commercial upholstery manufacturers in the country, designing and building custom furniture for hospitality and senior-living clients. The business runs on an operational stack including: SAP Business One for orders and production, monday.com for project work, and the Microsoft 365 suite. We're hiring an AI engineer to build those tools: agents, internal apps, and the pipelines behind them. What you'll do : Own internal AI tooling end to end. Sit with the person who has the problem, ship the tool, watch it run on live data, improve it. You'll work in a small team that carries products from idea through maintenance: ideating, sprint planning, executing, interviewing stakeholders.

Early candidates for the work:

productions scheduling, quoting, order status. You'll help identify what comes after.

Who you are:

The stack below is the floor. Beyond it, we care about range. Odd routes into engineering are welcome here: a lab, a kitchen, a shop floor, a design degree, a startup that didn't make it. You'll spend real time learning how furniture gets made, and the job rewards curiousity about it. You keep several projects moving at once and care where each one lands. What you've done: 1 + years building with Claude Code or a comparable AI coding tool. 3+ years of software engineering or equivalent experience. Shipped work using the core AI toolkit: tool calling, agentic loops, RAG and embeddings, structural output, evals, prompt and context engineering, cost and latency budgets. Fluency in Next.js, TypeScript, the AI SDK, and the Claude Agent SDK Built MCP servers and wired agents into them. Strong knowledge of MSSQL Server and MySQL databases; SAP Business One schema experience a plus. Graph Theory a plus. A CS or math degree helps; shipped work counts more.

What you get:

A competitive annual salary based on your experience. A comprehensive benefits package. Ability and flexibility to work on-site and/or remotely.

A real model budget:

frontier-model access and Claude Code spend located as core tooling Real ownership: first AI hire, your roadmap to shape, direct line to the people who decide. Sharp, driven coworkers. Strong knowledge of MSSQL Server and MySQL databases; SAP Business One schema experience a plus.

How to apply:

Send an agent or AI tool you've shipped (repo, demo video, or write-up) and a few sentences on what it changed, to ngould@kellex.com . Cover letter optional.

Job Type:

Full-time Benefits:

401(k) 401(k) matching Dental insurance Employee assistance program Flexible spending account Health insurance Life insurance Paid time off Vision insurance

Work Location:

Hybrid remote in Valdese, NC 28690