Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Sauna.ai is looking for an Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and scale the autonomous agent systems that power its AI coworker platform. The role is fully onsite in San Francisco and requires hands‑on delivery of production‑grade AI features.

Key responsibilities

• Implement multi‑step, tool‑using agents that call real APIs, handle retries, authentication, timeouts and edge cases.
• Design and maintain agent memory systems, including state persistence, memory migrations and context organization.
• Develop agents that can act proactively, send reminders and execute scheduled work.
• Own and evolve the evaluation framework, combining automated checks with human‑in‑the‑loop scoring.
• Collaborate across infrastructure, frontend and product teams to ensure reliable agent performance in production.

Required profile

• 3+ years of engineering experience with production software.
• Experience shipping agent‑like systems such as multi‑step LLM pipelines, tool‑using bots or scripted assistants.
• Ability to write production‑grade code without detailed specifications.
• Preference for candidates who have shipped agents used by external customers.

Required skills

• LLM pipeline development
• API integration and authentication flow implementation
• Agent orchestration and memory management
• Evaluation framework design, regression testing and success‑metric tracking
• Observability, tracing and failure handling in AI systems

What we offer

• Base salary $180K–$240K per year
• Early‑stage equity participation
• Health, dental, 401(k) benefits
• Generous PTO, gym budget and lunch allowance