Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

ABOUT THE ROLE
Join a small AI engineering team at an early-stage engineering software company building agentic AI for complex engineering workflows. As a hands-on technical leader, you will shape the agent intelligence that helps mechanical engineers complete multi-step tasks across desktop engineering tools, connecting user research, reliable task execution, and product delivery.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead the design and development of agent capabilities for multi-step workflows in desktop engineering software.
- Define evaluation frameworks, build reproducible benchmarks from validated user stories, and improve task completion while tracking failure modes.
- Set per-workflow token budgets and measure cost per completed task to support efficient, commercially viable systems.
- Partner with user researchers and domain experts to document and validate engineering workflows, then translate them into test cases.
- Prioritize workflow coverage based on customer value and technical feasibility.
- Own agent architecture decisions across tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
- Provide technical direction to a small team, review designs and code, unblock teammates, and contribute production code.
- Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world needs.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building LLM-based agents that take real-world actions.
- Deep experience with LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.
- Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, tracing or observability, and evaluation tools.
- Experience building rigorous agent evaluation and benchmarking systems that measure task completion, cost efficiency, and failure modes.
- Hands-on technical leadership experience setting direction and reviewing code for a small team while continuing to ship production software.
- Experience applying AI or LLM tooling to proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software. Background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or an adjacent domain is valuable.
- Familiarity with desktop automation or programmatic application control, such as COM, and enterprise workstation constraints.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Annual salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
No