Applied AI Engineer

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

You will own the agentic infrastructure at a seed-stage AI startup building the foundational layer for AI-native service operations. This means designing and shipping the systems that let agents execute reliably in production, retain months of client context, and know when to hand off to a human. This is a foundational engineering role at a very early team, with outsized scope and impact from day one.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build and maintain core infrastructure that enables agents to execute tasks reliably across dozens of iterations.

- Design and implement memory systems that retain months of client context from messy, real-world operational data.

- Develop eval harnesses that teams actually trust to make production shipping decisions.

- Own the full loop: build it, measure it, break it, fix it, and make it learn.

- Ship agent systems for real customers and iterate directly based on production feedback.

- Contribute across infrastructure, orchestration, customer collaboration, and early hiring as the team grows.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- 3+ years shipping LLM agents that ran unattended in production for real users, with a clear understanding that the model is the easy part.

- Hands-on experience building eval harnesses that were actually used to make production deployment decisions.

- Experience with retrieval and memory systems that work on real, messy operational data, not demo RAG pipelines.

- Strong Python proficiency for building production systems end to end.

- Experience with agent orchestration, workflow management, or reliability patterns such as failure recovery and retry logic.

- Experience building agent tooling, frameworks, or libraries is a strong plus.

- Experience with human-in-the-loop or approval workflow systems is a plus.

- Track record of intensity and execution: you force things into existence; open-source contributions or a founded technical project are a bonus.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Base salary: $150,000 to $250,000 USD annually.

- Meaningful early equity.

- Relocation assistance provided.

- Visa sponsorship available.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.