Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Oxbow Talent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meals provided in office

Competitive equity

In-office SF workspace

Job summary

Oxbow Talent is seeking a founding engineer to build and improve AI agents that power the core product. You will work across agent architecture, backend infrastructure, and product features, reporting directly to the CTO and collaborating daily with the founders.

As the team grows from four to six, you will own meaningful parts of the product from week one, shaping the roadmap and delivering end-to-end solutions that customers rely on.

Qualifications

• 2 to 5 years of commercial experience in full-stack software engineering, with production systems that served real customers at scale.
• Solid working knowledge of LLM APIs, prompt engineering and AI agent patterns.
• Python as a primary working language.
• Clear communication and the ability to prioritise and make decisions in a fast-moving environment.
• Willingness to commit fully to an early-stage team, including the pace and ambiguity that comes with it.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve AI agents that investigate and resolve IT support tickets across customer environments, handling complex multi-step workflows with policy controls and reliable recovery when things go sideways
• Scale the backend infrastructure and distributed systems that the agents run on, keeping reliability high as the customer base grows
• Ship product features across the full stack, including frontend, backend and third-party integrations, driven directly by customer feedback
• Work closely with the founders and the rest of the team daily, contributing to roadmap decisions as well as execution

Skills

Python

LLM APIs

Prompt engineering

AI agent patterns

Full-stack engineering

Job description

If you want to build AI agents that actually do things in production, rather than demo well in a slide deck, this is worth reading.

The company is a seed-stage startup building an AI-native platform for a large, established B2B services industry. The product is live, the customer contracts are signed, and traction is running ahead of where the team expected to be. The founding team comes from a strong set of backgrounds in AI research, enterprise software and product, and they are backed by a well-regarded US venture firm. The team is four people right now, all in the same San Francisco office, and they are hiring the next two engineers to join them.

The role

This is a founding engineering role focused on building and improving the AI agents at the core of the product. You will work across agent architecture, backend infrastructure and product features, reporting directly into the CTO and working alongside the founders daily. The scope is wide because the team is small, and what you build matters immediately.

Why it's worth a look

The founding engineer seat is real, not a title. You join a team of four, work directly with the founders, and own meaningful parts of the product from week one. The agents you build are the product, not a feature bolted onto something else. The company has paying customers and is growing faster than expected, which means the problems you are solving are real and the feedback loop is short. The equity is early-stage and the risk is honest, but so is the upside if the company executes.

What you'll be doing

• Build and improve AI agents that investigate and resolve IT support tickets across customer environments, handling complex multi-step workflows with policy controls and reliable recovery when things go sideways
• Scale the backend infrastructure and distributed systems that the agents run on, keeping reliability high as the customer base grows
• Ship product features across the full stack, including frontend, backend and third-party integrations, driven directly by customer feedback
• Work closely with the founders and the rest of the team daily, contributing to roadmap decisions as well as execution

What they're looking for

Must have:

• 2 to 5 years of commercial experience in full-stack software engineering, with production systems that served real customers at scale
• Solid working knowledge of LLM APIs, prompt engineering and AI agent patterns
• Python as a primary working language
• Clear communication and the ability to prioritise and make decisions in a fast-moving environment
• Willingness to commit fully to an early-stage team, including the pace and ambiguity that comes with it

Nice to have:

• Experience building AI agents or tool-using LLM systems that ran in production
• Previous work at an early-stage startup
• Background in enterprise IT, security or identity management
• Distributed systems or backend infrastructure experience beyond standard web services
• Full-stack capability including frontend

Package

• $175,000 to $220,000 base salary depending on experience
• 5 days in office, San Francisco, CA
• Competitive early-stage equity
• Meals provided in office, plus standard benefits