AI Agent Engineer

Starburst; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (ISOs)

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Starburst is hiring an AI Agent Engineer to design and ship production-grade agent architectures and tooling for enterprise data products. You will build reliable AI agents, handle real-world data quirks, and iterate quickly with an experienced team in a fast-paced environment.

You will push toward measurable improvements in accuracy and task completion while collaborating with researchers to ground and retrieve data. 25% travel is required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building AI/ML systems, with at least 1 year shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems in production.
• Direct experience at an AI startup or AI-focused product team.
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or custom).
• Production RAG pipeline experience (chunking strategies, vector databases, embedding models, reranking).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, observability, CI/CD, code review discipline.
• Track record of shipping frequently and iterating on user feedback.
• Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agent architectures: tool orchestration, planning, memory, multi-step reasoning, error recovery
• Ship production-quality agent features with clear ownership from design through deployment
• Close the gap between demo and production: handle partial schemas, inconsistent metadata, mixed data formats, and unreliable source systems
• Introduce proven patterns for agent reliability: structured error handling, fallback chains, observability, guardrails
• Build evaluation suites that catch hallucinations, regressions, and grounding gaps before they reach users
• Collaborate with the AI Research Engineer to integrate grounding and retrieval into agent workflows
• Drive technical standards for agent development through code, not documents
• Turn improvements into measurable gains in task completion rate, accuracy, and time-to-value

Skills

AI/ML systems

Agentic/LLM-powered systems

Agent frameworks

Production RAG pipelines

Software engineering fundamentals

CI/CD, observability

Travel willingness

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

CrewAI

Semantic Kernel

Job description

About Starburst

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai.

About the role

We build the AI layer for Starburst's products, including AIDA. We design agents that let users ask questions in natural language and get accurate, grounded answers backed by their actual data. We operate with startup speed inside an enterprise company, shipping weekly and measuring results. This is the first dedicated agent engineering hire on the team.

You will raise the bar on agent reliability, turning shipped features into systems users depend on. You will approach AI agents as production software systems, built with the same rigor as any large-scale backend platform. This is not a research role or a prototyping role. You will ship agentic features that work with messy real-world data, undocumented schemas, and diverse access patterns.

You have already shipped agentic or LLM-powered systems at an AI startup or AI-focused product team. You bring proven patterns, knowledge of real failure modes, and operational lessons that would take the team months to learn through trial and error. You write code every day and ship every week.

As an AI Agent Engineer at Starburst, you will:

• Design and build agent architectures: tool orchestration, planning, memory, multi-step reasoning, error recovery
• Ship production-quality agent features with clear ownership from design through deployment
• Close the gap between demo and production: handle partial schemas, inconsistent metadata, mixed data formats, and unreliable source systems
• Introduce proven patterns for agent reliability: structured error handling, fallback chains, observability, guardrails
• Build evaluation suites that catch hallucinations, regressions, and grounding gaps before they reach users
• Collaborate with the AI Research Engineer to integrate grounding and retrieval into agent workflows
• Drive technical standards for agent development through code, not documents
• Turn improvements into measurable gains in task completion rate, accuracy, and time-to-value

Some of the things we look for:

• 5+ years building AI/ML systems, with at least 1 year shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems in production
• Direct experience at an AI startup or AI-focused product team (not consulting, integration, or agency work)
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or custom)
• Production RAG pipeline experience (chunking strategies, vector databases, embedding models, reranking)
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, observability, CI/CD, code review discipline
• Track record of shipping frequently and iterating on user feedback
• Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with enterprise data systems (SQL engines, data catalogs, schema metadata)
• Experience building evaluation and observability pipelines for agentic systems
• Familiarity with JVM-based systems or polyglot development environments
• Contributions to open-source agent frameworks or tooling
• Experience with function calling, tool use patterns, and context window management

Starburst is dedicated to maintaining fair and equitable compensation practices. The salary range provided for this role reflects the minimum and maximum targets for candidates across all U.S. locations and could be inclusive of variable compensation, such as commission or bonus. Actual compensation packages are determined based on relevant skills, experience, education and training, and specific work location. For more information, connect with the recruiting team or Hiring Manager during the process as they can provide more detailed information about the salary range.

Pay Range

$180,000 — $225,000 USD

Build your career at Starburst

All-Stars have the opportunity and freedom to realize their true potential. By building alongside top talent, we’re empowered to take ownership of our careers and drive meaningful change. Anchored in industry-proven technology and unprecedented success, All-Stars are taking on the challenge everyday to disrupt our industry – and the future.

Benefits

• All employees receive equity packages (ISOs) and have access to a comprehensive benefits offering.
• This includes a variety of benefits like competitive pay, attractive stock grants, flexible paid time off, and more.
• Our global workforce is supported by a competitive Total Rewards program that reflects our commitment to a rewarding and supportive work environment.

We are committed to fostering an intentional, inclusive, and diverse culture that drives deep engagement, authentic belonging, and an exceptional All-Star experience. We believe that diversity of thought, perspective, background and experience will enable us to own what we do, drive our success and empower our All-Stars to show up authentically.

Starburst provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.