Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a senior technical leadership role at the heart of an early-stage AI software company building intelligent agents for hardware engineers. You will own the core agent intelligence layer that turns engineers' intent into reliable, cost-efficient multi-step workflows across desktop CAD, simulation, and PLM tools. Reporting directly to the CTO, the work you do here determines the product's real-world value to enterprise customers. WHAT YOU'LL DO

• 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.
• Drive agent task success rate by defining evaluation frameworks, establishing baselines, and iterating on completion metrics.
• Set and enforce per-task token budgets and track cost per completed workflow to ensure commercial viability.
• Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure grounded in validated user stories.
• Lead user story mapping and validation through interviews and close collaboration with domain experts.
• Translate validated user stories into testable evals, closing the loop between user research and benchmarking.
• Own agent architecture decisions including tool-calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
• Act as a player-coach: write production code, review designs, unblock the team, and raise engineering standards.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with integrations, product, and customers during POCs to align agent behavior with real-world usage. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 2 years building LLM-based agents that take real-world actions.
• Deep experience designing LLM application architectures: model selection, context and window management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration patterns.
• Hands-on experience shipping AI or LLM tooling on top of proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software (for example, agents or MCP servers over CAD, PLM, or simulation platforms); general-purpose chatbot or web-app RAG work alone does not qualify.
• Strong Python proficiency and familiarity with LLM function calling, tool APIs, observability and tracing, and evaluation frameworks.
• Proven ability to build evaluation and benchmarking frameworks measuring task completion, cost efficiency, and failure modes.
• Technical leadership experience: setting direction for small teams of 3 to 6 engineers and performing meaningful code review while continuing to write production code.
• Experience with desktop automation or programmatic control of applications such as COM or similar interfaces.
• Domain background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or an adjacent engineering-software field.
• Familiarity with enterprise deployment constraints on locked-down corporate workstations.
• Track record contributing to public benchmarks, publications, or open-source agentic AI projects is a plus. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.

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