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.