Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

About the role

This is a senior technical leadership role at an early‑stage AI software company building intelligent agents for hardware engineers, sitting at the intersection of applied agentic AI, user research, and product delivery. You will own the core agent intelligence layer that turns engineers' intent into reliable, cost‑efficient multi‑step workflows across desktop engineering tools, reporting directly to the CTO. The work you do will determine the real‑world value this product delivers to enterprise customers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead development of the agent intelligence layer that executes multi‑step workflows across complex desktop engineering software.
• Serve as technical lead for a small team of AI engineers, a user researcher, and domain‑expert contractors.
• Own the full product loop: define agent capabilities from user stories, build implementations, and benchmark against real workflows.
• Define evaluation frameworks, establish baselines, and iterate on completion metrics to drive task success rate.
• Set and enforce per‑task token budgets and track cost per completed workflow to ensure commercial viability.

Required profile

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building LLM‑based agents that take real‑world actions.
• Exceptional technical depth in complex agentic systems and strong hands‑on individual‑contributor capability.
• Deep experience with LLM application architecture: model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.
• Proven ability to ship AI or LLM tooling on top of proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software (e.g., CAD/PLM APIs, BOM data, firmware telemetry).
• Background in mechanical engineering, CAD/CAE, PLM, or adjacent engineering‑software domains is a strong plus.

Required skills

• Python
• Large Language Models (LLM) integration
• Tool calling and API orchestration
• Observability and tracing
• Evaluation tooling and benchmarking frameworks
• COM or similar desktop automation technologies
• CAD/PLM API interaction

What we offer

• Base salary $160,000 – $250,000 USD annually, plus equity.
• On‑site work in San Francisco, California.
• No visa sponsorship available for this role.