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Staff Engineer — Agentic AI

San FranciscoPosted 2 days ago
Full-timeremote

Job Description

About the Role

We're hiring a senior technical leader to own the core agent intelligence that turns engineers' intent into reliable, cost-efficient multi-step workflows across desktop engineering tools. This role sits at the intersection of applied agentic AI, user research, and product delivery and will determine the product's real-world value to enterprise customers.

You'll report to the CTO and serve as technical lead for a small team of AI engineers, a user researcher, and domain expert contractors in an early-stage, high-impact environment (Series A, Fortune 100 customers, direct line to leadership).

What You'll Do

  • Lead development of the core agent intelligence layer that executes multi-step workflows across complex desktop engineering software.

  • Own the full product loop: define agent capabilities from user stories, build implementations, and benchmark against real workflows.

  • Drive agent task success rate by defining evaluation frameworks, establishing baselines, and iterating to improve completion metrics.

  • Set and enforce per-task token budgets and track cost per completed workflow to ensure commercial viability.

  • Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure grounded in validated user stories.

  • Lead user story mapping and validation through interviews and close collaboration with domain experts.

  • Translate validated user stories into testable evals and close the loop between research and benchmarking.

  • Own agent architecture decisions including tool-calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.

  • Act as a player-coach: write production code, review designs, unblock the team, and raise engineering standards.

  • Collaborate cross-functionally with integrations, product, and customers during POCs to align agent behavior with real-world usage.

What We're Looking For

  • 7+ years in software engineering, including at least 2 years building agentic LLM-based agents that act in the real world.

  • Deep experience designing LLM application architectures, including model selection, context/window management, retrieval, and orchestration patterns.

  • Proven ability to build evaluation and benchmarking frameworks measuring task completion, cost efficiency, and failure modes.

  • Technical leadership experience setting direction for small teams (3–6 engineers) and performing meaningful code review.

  • Strong Python skills and familiarity with LLM tooling (function calling, tool APIs, observability/tracing, evaluation frameworks).

  • Experience with desktop automation or programmatic control of applications (COM or similar).

  • Nice to have: Domain experience in mechanical engineering, CAD/CAE, PLM, or adjacent industries.

  • Nice to have: Understanding of enterprise deployment constraints on locked-down corporate workstations.

  • Nice to have: Track record contributing to public benchmarks, publications, or open-source agentic AI projects.

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