Staff Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Staff AI Engineer - AI Agents and Infrastructure Compensation: Up to $270,000 + meaningful equityLocation: San Francisco, CA About the CompanyA fast-growing AI infrastructure startup is building intelligent automation systems for highly technical engineering workflows. Their platform enables complex desktop engineering tools to become programmable through AI agents, helping enterprise teams streamline mission-critical processes across manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, and industrial sectors.Backed by top-tier investors and trusted by global enterprise customers, the company is tackling one of the most ambitious applied AI challenges in the market today: building reliable, production-grade AI agents that can operate across complex real-world software environments.The RoleThis is a high-impact leadership opportunity for an experienced engineer who wants to shape the future of agentic AI systems in production enterprise environments.As a Staff Engineer focused on Agentic AI, you'll lead the development of the company's core intelligence layer the system responsible for understanding user intent and orchestrating multi-step workflows across sophisticated engineering software stacks.You'll work directly with senior leadership and partner closely with AI engineers, researchers, product teams, and domain specialists to design, evaluate, and scale AI agents capable of reliably executing real-world technical workflows.This role combines hands-on technical leadership, applied AI architecture, evaluation systems design, and deep product thinking. Success will be measured by real-world agent performance, workflow completion rates, reliability, and cost efficiency.What You'll DoAgent Performance & EvaluationDefine and improve agent task success metrics across complex multi-step workflowsBuild robust evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure grounded in real customer workflowsDesign frameworks for regression testing, adversarial evaluation, and reliability measurementEstablish token efficiency standards and optimize inference costs for commercial scalabilityAnalyze failure modes and continuously improve agent reliability and execution qualityWorkflow Mapping & Product IntelligencePartner with researchers and domain experts to deeply understand user workflowsTranslate customer workflows into measurable agent benchmarks and test casesPrioritize workflow automation opportunities based on technical feasibility and customer impactExpand end-to-end workflow coverage across increasingly complex technical environmentsTechnical LeadershipOwn key architectural decisions across orchestration, tool use, memory/state handling, context management, and model routingLead and mentor a small team of AI engineers while remaining highly hands-on technicallyCollaborate cross-functionally with product, integrations, and customer-facing teamsDrive engineering excellence through code reviews, system design, and technical directionContribute directly to implementation across core AI infrastructure and agent systemsWhat You'll BringProven experience building production-grade agentic AI systems using LLMsStrong understanding of tool-calling agents, multi-step orchestration, context management, and agent reliability patternsExperience designing evaluation frameworks for AI systems, including benchmarking, regression testing, and task completion analysisStrong Python engineering skills and familiarity with modern AI tooling ecosystemsExperience leading technical direction for small engineering teamsDeep understanding of tradeoffs between autonomy, reliability, latency, and cost in production AI systemsStrong product instincts and a pragmatic, shipping-oriented mindsetWhy Join?Work on one of the most challenging real-world applications of agentic AIBuild systems that operate in production enterprise environments "” not just demosHelp define evaluation standards for a new category of AI workflow automationJoin an early-stage, high-growth company with strong enterprise tractionPartner directly with experienced technical leadership and world-class engineersHigh ownership, fast iteration cycles, and significant technical influenceOpportunity to shape the long-term direction of a category-defining AI platformAbout People In AIPeople In AI partners with some of the world's most ambitious AI startups and scale-ups to help them hire exceptional technical talent. We work closely with companies building the next generation of AI infrastructure, foundation models, agentic systems, and applied machine learning platforms.

Created: 2026-05-15