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.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
No