Agent Engineer

About The Role
This role sits at the intersection of agent systems, platform engineering, integrations, and product development at an early-stage AI productivity startup building an autonomous executive assistant. You will help define what the assistant can do, how those capabilities work, and how they become dependable production experiences that users can trust with real work. It is a high-ownership position with direct influence on technical direction and product outcomes.
What You'll Do
Investigate advances in reasoning, planning, memory, tool use, and agent collaboration to identify valuable product opportunities.
Translate promising model behaviors into reliable, reusable skills and workflows that solve real user problems.
Build and evolve a custom Python agent harness, including execution loops, orchestration, context management, structured outputs, retries, and error recovery.
Design agent tools and integrations across email, calendars, messaging platforms, browsers, documents, CRMs, and other business software.
Own capabilities end-to-end across the Python agent, Django services, React interfaces, data models, background jobs, observability, and production operations.
Build platform abstractions that make capabilities easier to compose, extend, and maintain as the product grows more sophisticated.
Improve latency, cost, reliability, and safety across high-volume agent execution.
Partner with an Agent Evaluations team to define expected behavior, instrument capabilities, and turn quality findings into engineering improvements.
Study production traces and user feedback to understand where trust breaks down, then fix the underlying system.
Set technical direction on ambiguous problems and raise the engineering standard through design reviews and thoughtful execution.
What We're Looking For
5 or more years building production software systems end-to-end, including design, implementation, deployment, and operational iteration.
Strong Python proficiency with the ability to write maintainable production code, debug asynchronous systems, and design sound abstractions.
Hands-on experience building agent systems: planning, tool calling, structured outputs, context management, state management, retries, and orchestration.
Full-stack flexibility with deep Python and Django expertise plus comfort working with APIs, React, and TypeScript.
Experience designing and building integrations with external APIs and business software platforms such as email, calendars, messaging, and CRMs.
Ability to translate emerging technical capabilities and vague user needs into concrete, simple product features without requiring complete specifications.
Experience designing reusable platform abstractions and systems that enable composition, extension, and maintenance at scale.
Analytical debugging ability spanning prompts, traces, model outputs, application code, databases, and user interactions.
Familiarity with agent frameworks or orchestration platforms such as LangChain or AutoGen is a plus.
Experience optimizing for latency, cost, and reliability in high-volume distributed systems is a plus.
Background in autonomous systems, robotics, or workflow automation is a plus.
Location
Hybrid, based in Palo Alto, California. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Work arrangement
Yes