Applied AI Engineer - Agent
— · Newark, US
Job description
We’re hiring an Applied AI Engineer to push the boundaries of our Cofounder agent. You’ll own core backend systems and applied LLM work: advancing agent reliability and autonomy, building evaluation pipelines, and shipping techniques that measurably improve agent performance. This is a hands-on role with high ownership across research-to-production: prototyping, instrumenting, evaluating, and deploying improvements that show up directly in user outcomes.
What You’ll Do
- Design and implement agent improvements end-to-end: prompting strategies, tool selection, action planning, memory usage, safety/guardrails, and recovery paths
- Build robust evaluation pipelines for the agent: offline evals (golden tasks, regression suites, behavior tests), online metrics (latency, success rate, fallout modes, cost efficiency), and experimentation frameworks (A/B, canaries, guardrail thresholds)
- Productionize applied LLM techniques: function/tool-calling orchestration, self-reflection, retrieval/RAG, multi-agent handoffs, caching/embedding strategies, and hallucination reduction
- Improve core backend systems: reliable job orchestration, retries/backoff, idempotency, and auditability; scalable memory and context routing; data pipelines across Gmail, Slack, Notion, Linear, Google Workspace, etc.; observability and tracing for agent actions/outcomes
- Partner with product and infra to define success metrics and ship fast, safe iterations
- Write clean, well-tested code; document design decisions and runbooks
What You’ll Bring
- 4+ years backend engineering experience, preferably Python (we care about impact over years)
- Hands-on LLM experience: prompt engineering, function-calling, retrieval, embeddings, evaluation design; you’ve shipped LLM features to production
- Track record building evaluation harnesses and using them to drive improvements (regression suites, task success metrics, cost/runtime tradeoffs)
- Solid distributed systems fundamentals: concurrency, reliability, performance, data modeling, lifecycle management
- Pragmatic experimentation: hypothesis prototype measured improvement rollout
- Excellent debugging and instrumentation skills; you enjoy finding and fixing edge cases in the wild
Nice To Have
- Experience with agent frameworks, tool orchestration, and memory architectures
- RAG systems in production (chunking, retrieval quality, freshness strategies)
- Redis, Postgres/Supabase, queues (e.g., Celery/Arq/SQS), and event-driven designs
- Observability stacks (Datadog, OpenTelemetry), and cost/latency optimization
Why Join Us
- Mission: build autonomous agents that run entire businesses
- Impact: ship core agent improvements that users feel immediately
- Velocity: small, senior team; fast decision cycles; high ownership
- Stack: modern tooling across AI orchestration, integrations, and memory systems
Compensation
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity
- Comprehensive benefits and flexible work setup
Compensation Range: $250K - $300K
ML/AI Work links you to the employer's original posting — always verify the details there before applying.
More Core AI Engineering roles
View all →GenAI / Agentic AI Engineer (US)
TD · Philadelphia, US
$98,160 – $159,270/yr18 days ago
Senior AI Engineer, Scientific Training & Collaboration
— · San Jose, US
$220,000 – $350,000/yrSenior18 days ago
AI Engineer, Government Solutions & APIs
— · San Jose, US
18 days ago
AI Solutions Engineer - Defense Tech (Secret Clearance)
— · Baltimore, US
18 days ago
AI Solutions Engineer
Innodata · Baltimore, US
$156,000 – $166,400/yr18 days ago
AI Developer
ARCHE consulting · Remote · Poznań
Remote18 days ago
$250,000 – $300,000/yr
Newark, US