AI Engineer, Agent Infrastructure

Zed; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Zed is seeking an engineer to own the infrastructure behind our production AI agents in San Francisco. This role encompasses defining how AI interacts with tools, handling systems reliably, and ensuring agents execute tasks effectively.

The ideal candidate has production experience with LLM or agent systems and a strong backend engineering background. Join us to build systems that are crucial to our AI-powered banking solutions and innovate the future of finance.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production AI agents or LLM systems end-to-end.
• Strong foundation in backend or infrastructure engineering.
• Familiarity with automation systems or agent frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Own the execution layer for AI agents.
• Define interactions with internal systems and APIs.
• Design permissioning models for agent execution safety.
• Build monitoring infrastructure for agent behavior.

Skills

Production LLM or agent systems experience

Backend or infrastructure engineering

Workflow orchestration experience

Evaluation and observability loops for AI

Job description

About Zed

Zed is building the first AI-native, licensed neobank in the Philippines designed to democratize access to premium financial services for young professionals in global markets. The current banking system is broken, often shutting out the world’s youngest and fastest-growing consumer classes—we’re here to fix it.

Our team is uniquely positioned to solve this. We are Stanford engineers and former YC founders who have spent our careers at the intersection of banking and hyper-growth startups like Square, Facebook, and Box. We’ve been here before, having previously built and exited Symple (YC W'17), a fast-growing B2B payments company.

We are backed by world-class investors, including Accel, Valar, Immad Akhund (Mercury), Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator), and Kunal Shah (Cred).

The Role

We're hiring an engineer to own the infrastructure layer behind our production AI agents.

This is not a prompt engineering role. It's not a UI role. It's about the harness around LLMs — the systems that determine how agents actually execute tasks, interact with tools, access internal and external systems, stay within permission boundaries, and behave reliably in production.

You'll sit at the intersection of backend infrastructure and product, and what you build will define how AI is deployed across the company.

What You’ll Work On

• Build and own the execution layer for AI agents — task orchestration, tool calling, state management
• Define how agents interact with internal systems and external APIs
• Design sandboxed environments and permissioning models for safe, controlled agent execution
• Build evaluation, monitoring, and debugging infrastructure for agent behavior in production
• Integrate agents into real product workflows where correctness and reliability are non-negotiable
• Improve system performance across latency, cost, and quality tradeoffs

What You Bring

• Direct experience shipping production LLM or agent systems end-to-end — orchestration, evaluation, reliability, not just prototypes
• Strong backend or infrastructure engineering foundation (distributed systems, APIs, platform engineering)
• Experience with workflow orchestration, automation systems, or agent frameworks
• Familiarity with evaluation and observability loops for AI systems
• Ability to think across both infrastructure concerns and product behavior — this role requires both

Strong Signals

• You've built agent systems that take real actions, not just generate text
• You've designed execution environments — task runners, sandboxes, job systems
• You've worked on AI that's deeply embedded in a real product, not a side project or internal tool
• You have experience with observability and evaluation loops for AI systems in production

Why This Role

Most teams are still prototyping. We're past that.

This role determines whether our agents are reliable or brittle, safe or risky, useful or demo-only. You'll be building the layer that makes production AI actually work — at a company where AI is core to how we underwrite, operate, and scale.

We hire exceptional people from diverse backgrounds because different perspectives build better products.

If you’re excited about this role but don’t check every box, apply anyway. We value potential, ownership, and alignment with our values more than perfect résumés.