Applied AI Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

You will own the agentic infrastructure at a well-funded AI infrastructure startup, building the systems that let AI agents execute reliably, retain context over months, and know when to involve a human. This is a founding engineer role where your decisions directly shape how agents plan, remember, fail, and recover in production.

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 extracted from messy, real-world operational data.

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

- Own the full loop: build, measure, break, fix, and improve agent systems based on production feedback.

- Ship agent systems directly to real customers and iterate on them based on live feedback.

- Contribute across infrastructure, orchestration, customer collaboration, and early hiring as needed.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

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

- Proven experience building eval harnesses that were actually used to make production shipping decisions.

- Strong Python proficiency applied to production systems, not prototypes.

- Experience with agent memory management, context retrieval, and orchestration on real operational data (not demo RAG pipelines).

- Hands-on experience with agent orchestration frameworks, workflow management, or infrastructure tooling.

- Experience implementing failure recovery, retry logic, or reliability patterns in production agent systems.

- Bonus: open-source agent tooling contributions, experience with human-in-the-loop or approval workflows, or a founded/led technical project.

- Exceptional intensity and execution, comfortable owning work well beyond a narrow specialty at an early-stage company.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

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

- Equity: meaningful early equity stake.

- Relocation support and visa sponsorship available.

LOCATION

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States. Relocation support is provided.