Applied AI Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE You will own the agentic infrastructure at a seed-stage AI startup building the foundational layer for AI-native service operations. This means designing and shipping the systems that let agents execute reliably in production, retain months of client context, and know when to hand off to a human. This is a foundational engineering role at a very early team, with outsized scope and impact from day one. 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 from messy, real-world operational data. - Develop eval harnesses that teams actually trust to make production shipping decisions. - Own the full loop: build it, measure it, break it, fix it, and make it learn. - Ship agent systems for real customers and iterate directly based on production feedback. - Contribute across infrastructure, orchestration, customer collaboration, and early hiring as the team grows. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3+ years shipping LLM agents that ran unattended in production for real users, with a clear understanding that the model is the easy part. - Hands-on experience building eval harnesses that were actually used to make production deployment decisions. - Experience with retrieval and memory systems that work on real, messy operational data, not demo RAG pipelines. - Strong Python proficiency for building production systems end to end. - Experience with agent orchestration, workflow management, or reliability patterns such as failure recovery and retry logic. - Experience building agent tooling, frameworks, or libraries is a strong plus. - Experience with human-in-the-loop or approval workflow systems is a plus. - Track record of intensity and execution: you force things into existence; open-source contributions or a founded technical project are a bonus. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Base salary: $150,000 to $250,000 USD annually. - Meaningful early equity. - Relocation assistance provided. - Visa sponsorship available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.