Senior Staff AI Engineer

About the company

Our client is a fast-growing software company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Act as the most senior hands-on engineer on an applied AI team, owning technical direction for a production system of autonomous software agents. Design and build the core capabilities that let agents reason and act dependably, while guiding two junior engineers and working alongside product and machine learning leaders.

What you'll do

- Build and extend a production framework for AI agents, including the coordination, tooling, state and quality-checking layers.

- Set the technical direction for moving a software platform from a conversational interface to an agent-first experience.

- Develop agent tools and specialized sub-agents that mirror how domain experts approach their daily work.

- Integrate frontier language models into the application and contribute to fine-tuning efforts for domain-specific reasoning.

- Add instrumentation and testing so agent behavior can be monitored and scored on realistic tasks, raising dependability until users are comfortable letting agents act on their own.

- Lead and mentor two junior engineers while collaborating closely with product and machine learning leadership.

What we're looking for

- 8 to 15 years of experience with expert-level full-stack programming skills (for example Python and TypeScript).

- Track record of building agent frameworks and taking complex production agent systems well beyond a first release.

- Hands-on experience with a low-level agent orchestration library or something comparable.

- Ability to set technical direction rather than only execute.

- Experience in a startup, or a career that blends large technology companies and startups.

- Some grounding in the natural sciences, through study or professional work.

- An advanced degree in a technical field is preferred.

Bonus points

- Experience fine-tuning reasoning models.

- Experience applying AI to scientific problem solving.

- Experience with React.

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 265,000 to 310,000 per year

- Equity

Location and work model

- Oakland, CA, United States

- Hybrid, 3 days per week in office

- Full-time