AI Engineer, Agent Platform

Francisco Partners; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision care forYou

401(K) matching program

Paid time off and holidays

FSA/HSA and commuter benefits

Job summary

NewsBreak in Mountain View, CA, is building the agent platform powering next-generation AI products. You’ll own end-to-end development of the agent runtime, context engineering, and evaluation harness, shipping features weekly with product teams.

You’ll collaborate across backend, frontend, and deployment, applying modern AI tooling and evaluating foundation models. This role emphasizes scalability, observable metrics, and delivering usable internal tools to production.

Qualifications

• Shipping an AI product with real users.
• Experience with modern AI development tooling.
• Able to work end-to-end independently.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the agent runtime orchestrating context, tools, routing and workflow tracking.
• Design eval and observability harness handling thousands of traces daily.
• Own context engineering including retrieval, ranking and memory.
• Benchmark new foundation models and guide model selection.
• Build user-facing surfaces and ship them to production.
• Collaborate with product to ship working v1 in weeks.

Skills

Python

Go

Node.js

React

Next.js

AI tooling

Backend engineering

Frontend capability

Product sensibility

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Codex

v0

Job description

About NewsBreak

Founded in 2015, NewsBreak is the Content Intelligence platform shaping the future content economy. With over 40 million monthly active users, our flagship platform delivers highly personalized local news and information powered by advanced AI, recommendation systems, and adtech.

Recognized by Fast Company as #32 on the Top Workplaces for Innovators, we're proud to be Great Place to Work® certified and home to a dynamic team of technologists, product innovators, and business leaders who are passionate about solving meaningful challenges at scale.

Together, we reached unicorn status in 2021, and we remain committed to continuing this high-growth trajectory with the right team to fulfill our mission: building the infrastructure layer for content intelligence.

If you’re inspired to dream big, innovate fast, and make a difference, we’d love to hear from you! For more information, visit www.newsbreak.com/about

About the Role

We're building the agent platform that powers NewsBreak's next‑generation AI products — from local‑news synthesis agents that millions of Americans wake up to, to paid‑growth agents that autonomously decide what to advertise and where. One platform, several agentic products, real users, real spend, real consequences.

We're hiring our first dedicated Agent Platform engineer to own this layer end‑to‑end. You'll join a small, focused team that ships weekly, works closely with product, and takes eval and observability seriously. Our codebase already runs multiple agents in production — and you'll help build what comes next.

Responsibilities

• Build the agent runtime that orchestrates context assembly, tool invocation, model routing, and workflow tracking across multiple agentic products — the foundational layer that other teams build on top of
• Design the eval and observability harness that runs thousands of agent traces per day, surfaces regressions before they ship, and turns production failures into actionable improvements
• Own the context engineering layer — retrieval, ranking, compression, and memory — that determines what makes it into a model call; contribute informed opinions on RAG vs. long‑context vs. structured tool returns
• Integrate and benchmark new foundation models as they become available; make principled decisions about model selection across agents based on capability and cost
• Build user‑facing surfaces — playgrounds, agent traces, control panels — and ship them to production; the internal product team relies on these tools daily
• Collaborate closely with product to take new agent concepts from early brief to working v1 in weeks

Requirements

• Demonstrable experience shipping an AI product with real users — a side project, internal tool, open‑source agent, or startup MVP you can speak to concretely
• Active, hands‑on familiarity with modern AI development tooling (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, v0, or equivalents) and a clear sense of how and when to apply them
• Ability to work end‑to‑end independently: backend, frontend, deployment, instrumentation, and iteration — without needing a fully defined spec to get started
• Developed perspective on AI agent design: context management, tool‑calling protocols, eval strategy, and the tradeoffs between fine‑tuning, prompting, and scaffolding
• Strong proficiency in Python (or Go / Node) with solid backend engineering experience — APIs, databases, queues, caches — and an understanding of how system design needs evolve with scale
• Sufficient frontend capability (React or Next.js) to ship functional internal tools independently
• Product sensibility: willingness to push back when something feels off, and a habit of thinking about the end user alongside the technical architecture

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating a multi‑agent system in production (orchestration, sub‑agents, MCP, skills)
• Hands‑on experience with eval frameworks (LM‑eval, custom harnesses, LLM‑as‑judge), prompt iteration workflows, or fine‑tuning (LoRA / RLHF / DPO)
• A public artifact — GitHub repo, technical blog, paper, or demo — that reflects how you approach problems
• Experience integrating LLMs with complex, real‑world data (news, ads, geo, user behavior) at scale

Benefits

We offer a competitive benefits package:

• Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family (100% coverage for employee)
• Top‑tier 401(K) plan with company matching
• Paid time off and paid holidays
• FSA, HSA and commuter benefits programs
• Team activity budget

The US base salary range for this full‑time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job‑related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

Annual Base Pay Range

$120,000 — $220,000 USD

CPRA Privacy Notice for California Candidates