Staff Software Engineer - Agent Architecture
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Agent Architecture based in United States.
This role offers the opportunity to define the future of enterprise AI systems in a highly impactful and regulated environment.
You will lead the architecture, development, and scaling of production-grade AI agents that interact with real users and handle critical business workflows.
Working at the intersection of software engineering, AI infrastructure, and platform design, you will shape how intelligent systems are built, tested, and operated.
You will influence engineering standards, establish best practices, and create frameworks that enable teams to safely deliver AI-powered experiences.
The role requires a strong technical leader who can move between strategic architecture decisions and hands-on implementation.
Your work will directly impact product innovation, operational reliability, and the evolution of AI capabilities at scale.
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Agent Architecture based in United States.
This role offers the opportunity to define the future of enterprise AI systems in a highly impactful and regulated environment.
You will lead the architecture, development, and scaling of production-grade AI agents that interact with real users and handle critical business workflows.
Working at the intersection of software engineering, AI infrastructure, and platform design, you will shape how intelligent systems are built, tested, and operated.
You will influence engineering standards, establish best practices, and create frameworks that enable teams to safely deliver AI-powered experiences.
The role requires a strong technical leader who can move between strategic architecture decisions and hands-on implementation.
Your work will directly impact product innovation, operational reliability, and the evolution of AI capabilities at scale.
Accountabilities:
- Define and drive the architecture strategy for agentic AI systems, establishing frameworks, integration patterns, and engineering standards across teams.
- Design, build, and deploy production-grade AI agents that support multiple user experiences and business workflows.
- Create scalable agent platforms with strong support for multi-tenant configurations, isolation, evaluation, and customization requirements.
- Develop and maintain architecture documentation, including current-state analysis, future-state designs, and migration strategies.
- Build robust integrations between AI agents and existing backend systems, APIs, partner services, and enterprise platforms.
- Establish best practices around tool design, including schemas, permissions, error handling, idempotency, and safe execution of agent actions.
- Make strategic decisions around AI approaches, including model selection, RAG implementation, tool usage, orchestration patterns, fine-tuning, and deterministic workflows.
- Design and operate complete AI lifecycle processes, including testing frameworks, evaluation systems, observability, monitoring, and continuous improvement loops.
- Implement safe deployment practices for non-deterministic systems, including version management, controlled rollouts, monitoring, and rollback strategies.
- Optimize AI system performance and economics through token management, caching strategies, model routing, latency improvements, and cost attribution.
- Build security and compliance guardrails for AI systems, including privacy protection, identity management, consent handling, and human escalation workflows.
- Partner with Security, Compliance, and Legal teams to ensure AI solutions meet regulatory requirements and operational standards.
- Develop practices to identify and mitigate AI-specific risks such as prompt injection, social engineering attacks, and unsafe tool usage.
- Contribute to voice-based AI experiences by addressing challenges around latency, conversational flow, speech technologies, and telephony integrations.
- Mentor engineers and promote strong AI engineering practices through coaching, technical reviews, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.
- Partner with engineering, product, and leadership teams to translate business needs into durable technical solutions.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with Staff-level scope, including technical leadership, cross-team influence, and ownership of major initiatives.
- Proven experience designing and shipping production-grade agentic AI systems used by real customers, beyond prototypes or internal experiments.
- Deep knowledge of modern AI agent frameworks and orchestration approaches, including experience with tools such as LangGraph or similar technologies.
- Strong understanding of the complete AI agent lifecycle, including prompt engineering, tool design, evaluation strategies, observability, tracing, and production optimization.
- Advanced software engineering skills with strong fundamentals in system design, reliability, APIs, data modeling, and scalable architecture.
- Experience integrating AI capabilities into existing transactional systems while maintaining performance, security, and data integrity.
- Ability to work effectively with backend technologies such as Ruby on Rails, MySQL, microservices architectures, cloud platforms, and containerized environments.
- Strong experience with AI safety principles, responsible AI practices, privacy protection, and secure handling of sensitive information.
- Experience designing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including embeddings, vector databases, retrieval strategies, and optimization techniques.
- Strong understanding of LLM evaluation frameworks, testing methodologies, scoring systems, and production feedback loops.
- Experience optimizing AI application economics through caching, model selection, routing strategies, and performance improvements.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to engineering, product, security, and business stakeholders.
- Ability to balance high-level architectural thinking with hands-on coding and implementation.
- Preferred experience with voice AI systems, including speech-to-text, text-to-speech, conversational design, telephony platforms, and real-time interaction challenges.
- Preferred experience in regulated industries such as payments, fintech, healthcare, lending, or insurance.
- Preferred experience with AI security testing, multi-tenant agent platforms, and adversarial testing of AI systems.
- Competitive annual salary range of $225,000 – $285,000 USD.
- Equity opportunities through a company stock options program.
- Remote work flexibility with a distributed team environment.
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits with full employee coverage.
- Company-sponsored life and disability insurance.
- $50 monthly communication stipend to support phone and internet expenses.
- $250 work-from-home setup stipend and reimbursement for eligible equipment purchases.
- Paid parental bonding leave.
- Paid sick leave, jury duty leave, bereavement leave, and volunteer time off.
- 401(k) retirement plan.
- Flexible paid time off, with team members typically taking several weeks of vacation annually.
- 13 scheduled company holidays.
- Opportunity to work on innovative AI solutions shaping the future of digital payments.
- Collaborative culture focused on ownership, transparency, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.
As a Staff Software Engineer specializing in Agent Architecture, you will own the technical direction and implementation of AI agent platforms, ensuring they are scalable, secure, reliable, and optimized for real-world usage.
Requirements:
The ideal candidate is a senior software engineer with extensive experience building AI systems in production environments and the ability to lead complex technical initiatives across teams.