Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

ABOUT THE ROLE
This is a senior technical leadership role at the heart of an early-stage AI software company building intelligent agents for hardware engineers. You will own the core agent intelligence layer that turns engineers' intent into reliable, cost-efficient multi-step workflows across desktop CAD, simulation, and PLM tools. Reporting directly to the CTO, the work you do here determines the product's real-world value to enterprise customers.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead development of the agent intelligence layer that executes multi-step workflows across complex desktop engineering software.
- Serve as technical lead for a small team of AI engineers, a user researcher, and domain expert contractors.
- 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 on 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, closing the loop between user 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 of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building LLM-based agents that take real-world actions.
- Deep experience designing LLM application architectures: model selection, context and window management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration patterns.
- Hands-on experience shipping AI or LLM tooling on top of proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software (for example, agents or MCP servers over CAD, PLM, or simulation platforms); general-purpose chatbot or web-app RAG work alone does not qualify.
- Strong Python proficiency and familiarity with LLM function calling, tool APIs, observability and tracing, and evaluation frameworks.
- Proven ability to build evaluation and benchmarking frameworks measuring task completion, cost efficiency, and failure modes.
- Technical leadership experience: setting direction for small teams of 3 to 6 engineers and performing meaningful code review while continuing to write production code.
- Experience with desktop automation or programmatic control of applications such as COM or similar interfaces.
- Domain background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or an adjacent engineering-software field.
- Familiarity with enterprise deployment constraints on locked-down corporate workstations.
- Track record contributing to public benchmarks, publications, or open-source agentic AI projects is a plus.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
No