AI Engineer, Agents and Evaluation

Pronoia; Torrance (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Relocation assistance

Professional development stipend

Access to cutting-edge labs

Job summary

Pronoia Energy, a pioneering quantum energy storage startup in Torrance, California, seeks an AI Engineer to build an internal, agent-driven system. You will orchestration plans, route tools, and implement the first verification gate to ensure factual grounding before the team acts on it.

You will deploy a self-hosted open-weights model on-site, create an evaluation harness, and enforce strict traceability to sources or deterministic computations, wearing multiple hats as a founding generalist.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping a real agent or tool-use system in production.
• Genuine experience self-hosting open-weights models on own GPUs, not just API calls.
• Treating hallucination and tool-misuse as engineering problems with mechanical fixes.
• Builder-generalist range across orchestration, model serving, and evaluation.
• Self-starter who thrives amid ambiguity and rapid iteration.

Responsibilities

• Build the agent orchestrator and the tool-routing logic at the heart of the system.
• Stand up and serve a self-hosted open-weights model on local hardware.
• Build the first verification gate and evaluation harness, grounding procedures to sources or deterministic computations.
• Enforce strict routing so claims trace to a retrieved source or a deterministic computation.
• Wear several hats as a founding generalist and later hand specialties to dedicated hires.

Skills

Agent orchestration

Tool routing

Self-hosting GPUs

Grounding & evaluation

Ambiguity handling

Tools

vLLM

TGI

Agent frameworks

Job description

Pronoia Energy is a pioneering deep tech startup at the forefront of quantum energy storage innovation. As a lean, mission-driven team, we thrive on rapid prototyping, cross-disciplinary collaboration and solving complex engineering challenges to turn quantum physics into practical, scalable products. Our current focus is on developing our groundbreaking room-temperature macroscopic quantum energy storage technology that promises orders of magnitude greater energy density, faster charging, and higher power delivery as well as being cheaper and safer compared to existing battery technology. This represents a paradigm shift in energy storage with applications spanning consumer electronics, electric vehicles, renewable grids, and beyond.

Role Summary:

To meet our ambitious goals we are building an internal, grounded, agentic AI system that accelerates our research, and we are hiring an AI Engineer to build two things: the orchestration that plans and routes the work, and the verification layer that stops the system from stating anything it cannot support. It is a founding, high-leverage role, and you will own the part of the stack that decides what counts as true before the team acts on it. In this role you will build the agent orchestrator that plans a research question into steps and routes each step to the right tool, and the first verification gate and evaluation harness that catch the system before it states anything unsupported. You will enforce our defining rule: factual questions go to retrieval, computational questions go to tools, and nothing is answered from the model's own memory. You will stand up a self-hosted open-weights model on our own hardware and build the entire agent loop around it. This is a founding generalist role, and early on you will wear several hats across orchestration, serving, and evaluation. This role is onsite in Torrance, California.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build the agent orchestrator and the tool-routing logic at the heart of the system.
• Stand up and serve a self-hosted open-weights model on local hardware.
• Build the first verification gate and evaluation harness, making grounding mechanical rather than hopeful.
• Enforce strict routing so claims trace to a retrieved source or a deterministic computation.
• Wear several hats as a founding generalist and later hand specialties to dedicated hires.

Required Qualifications:

• A track record shipping a real agent or tool-use system in production, not a demo.
• Genuine experience self-hosting open-weights models on your own GPUs, not only calling a hosted API.
• A habit of treating hallucination and tool-misuse as engineering problems with mechanical fixes.
• Builder-generalist range across orchestration, model serving, and evaluation.
• A self-starter who thrives amid ambiguity and rapid iteration.

Preferred Qualifications:

• A scientific or physics background that makes our zero-fabrication standard second nature.
• Contributions to open-source serving or agent tooling such as vLLM, TGI, or agent frameworks.
• Experience building retrieval-augmented systems and evaluation suites.
• Prior work in deep tech R&D alongside interdisciplinary teams.

What We Offer:

• Chance to solve one of the world's biggest engineering challenges and pioneer quantum energy storage.
• Competitive salary, equity in a transformative startup, and performance-based incentives.
• Access to cutting-edge labs, tools, and resources in a flexible, collaborative work environment.
• Comprehensive benefits: health insurance, unlimited PTO, professional development stipend, and relocation assistance if needed.
• A culture of innovation where your work will accelerate our path to market impact.