Agent AI Engineer for Scientific Discovery (Production)

Phylo, Inc.; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Unlimited PTO

Lunch and snacks

Team offsites

Culture of excellence

Impactful work in biomedical discovery

Job summary

Phylo, Inc. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff – Agent Engineer to build and evaluate production-ready AI agent systems for scientific discovery. You will own end-to-end harnesses that shape planning, tool use, context management, and recovery from failure, bringing the latest research into production.

The role emphasizes engineering execution, quantitative thinking, and collaboration with scientists and engineers to productionize new agent capabilities for biomedical research.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building production backend systems, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Research or production experience in machine learning, or another quantitative discipline.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, tool calling, agent runtimes, or workflow orchestration.
• Strong quantitative judgment and the ability to determine whether an apparent improvement is real, reproducible, and meaningful.
• Ability to move between research questions, data analysis, system design, and production implementation.
• Experience or strong interest in AI for science, scientific agents, computational research, or automated scientific discovery.
• Experience working in AI-native teams that use coding agents or automation extensively.
• High ownership, clear communication, and strong engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Advance the agent harness by bringing the latest research and open-source developments into production and experimenting with new approaches to multi-agent coordination, model routing, memory, planning, and tool use.
• Build rigorous evaluations that measure agent quality, reliability, latency, and cost on representative scientific tasks.
• Monitor agent quality in production, troubleshoot failures quickly in high-ambiguity situations, and translate findings into engineering improvements.
• Collaborate on reliable infrastructure for long-running sessions, safe sandboxed execution, background work, and subagents.
• Partner with scientists and engineers to evaluate and productionize new agent capabilities.

Skills

Backend systems

ML experience

LLM tooling

Quantitative judgment

Research-to-production

AI for science

Team collaboration

Engineering judgment

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Phylo, Inc. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff – Agent Engineer to build and evaluate production-ready AI agent systems for scientific discovery. You will own end-to-end harnesses that shape planning, tool use, context management, and recovery from failure, bringing the latest research into production.

The role emphasizes engineering execution, quantitative thinking, and collaboration with scientists and engineers to productionize new agent capabilities for biomedical research.