Founding AI Harness & Tooling Engineer (Remote)

Big Wombat LLC; United States; Remote; USD 215,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Remote work

Founding-team role

Job summary

Yaklabs is building a desktop AI application that turns knowledge workers into AI power users, without docs, API keys, or knowing what to ask for. One surface for agentic AI work: proactive, personalized, progressively powerful.

The team is seeking a Software Engineer to design the agent harness, runtime, and extension system, owning the trust boundary and the inference stack. This is a founding-team role with impact on product direction and culture.

Qualifications

• You understand agent runtimes underneath: tool-calling loops, context windows, partial failures in multi-step tasks.
• You have opinions about what’s wrong with most agent frameworks.
• You think in compounding loops. You’ve designed systems that get better through use.
• Strong systems instincts. You think about failure modes, resource limits, isolation, and concurrency.
• You’ve worked with LLM APIs at the protocol level: streaming, tool use, structured outputs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the agent runtime: dispatch, execution lifecycle, tool calling, error handling, retries, cancellation.
• Build the extension system, where FDEs, users, and agents themselves customize the harness.
• Own the trust boundary: sandboxing, permissions, credentials, and which actions an agent takes alone vs. approved.
• Build the inference layer: provider abstraction, streaming, and cost tracking.
• Design the context system: how context is assembled, compressed, and managed across long sessions.
• Own observability. Every agent action should be a structured event you can query, export, and audit.

Job description

Yaklabs is building a desktop AI application that turns knowledge workers into AI power users, without docs, API keys, or knowing what to ask for. One surface for agentic AI work: proactive, personalized, progressively powerful.

The team is seeking a Software Engineer to design the agent harness, runtime, and extension system, owning the trust boundary and the inference stack. This is a founding-team role with impact on product direction and culture.