Staff Engineer, Agentic AI

About the Role Join a small AI engineering team at an early-stage engineering software company building agentic AI for complex engineering workflows. As a hands-on technical leader, you will shape the agent intelligence that helps mechanical engineers complete multi-step tasks across desktop engineering tools, connecting user research, reliable task execution, and product delivery. What You'll Do Lead the design and development of agent capabilities for multi-step workflows in desktop engineering software. Define evaluation frameworks, build reproducible benchmarks from validated user stories, and improve task completion while tracking failure modes. Set per-workflow token budgets and measure cost per completed task to support efficient, commercially viable systems. Partner with user researchers and domain experts to document and validate engineering workflows, then translate them into test cases. Prioritize workflow coverage based on customer value and technical feasibility. Own agent architecture decisions across tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management. Provide technical direction to a small team, review designs and code, unblock teammates, and contribute production code. Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world needs. What We're Looking For At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building LLM-based agents that take real-world actions. Deep experience with LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration. Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, tracing or observability, and evaluation tools. Experience building rigorous agent evaluation and benchmarking systems that measure task completion, cost efficiency, and failure modes. Hands-on technical leadership experience setting direction and reviewing code for a small team while continuing to ship production software. Experience applying AI or LLM tooling to proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software. Background in mechanical engineering, CAD, CAE, PLM, or an adjacent domain is valuable. Familiarity with desktop automation or programmatic application control, such as COM, and enterprise workstation constraints. Compensation & Benefits Annual salary range: $160,000 to $250,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.