Frontier AI Engineering

Postman; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Flexible PTO

Wellness reimbursement

Monthly lunch stipend

Donation matching

In‑office collaboration

Job summary

Postman, the world’s leading API platform, is seeking Frontier AI Engineers to design, build, and deploy real AI and agentic systems in production. You will work directly with ambitious customers to create tool‑enabled agents, RAG pipelines, and end‑to‑end AI workflows across the stack.

This hands‑on role requires deep systems thinking, collaboration with AI and platform teams, and a focus on secure, observable, and scalable AI solutions.

Responsibilities

• Build real AI systems with LLMs, agents, MCP, APIs, tool calling, RAG, vector search, structured outputs, multimodal models, and production AI workflows.
• Design agentic systems that can reason across tools, APIs, enterprise data, and workflows while maintaining proper identity, permissions, policy, and execution controls.
• Work across the model layer, experimenting with foundation models, model routing, inference, prompt engineering, and the tradeoffs between quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Make AI measurable by building evaluation systems for agents and LLM applications, including task success, tool correctness, hallucination detection, regression testing, safety, latency, and cost.
• Make AI production ready by building observability, tracing, guardrails, fallback strategies, rate limits, retries, caching, and the infrastructure to operate AI systems at scale.
• Solve the context problem by helping customers reason about retrieval, memory, grounding, context windows, embeddings, vector databases, and enterprise data.
• Secure agent actions with authentication, authorization, secrets management, API access, policy enforcement, auditability, and controls when AI systems can take actions.
• Own problems end to end from architecture to prototype to evaluation to production, staying close to the code and shipping.

Job description

Who Are We?

Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman.

P.S: We highly recommend reading the "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman.

About the Team

We are building a small, exceptional Frontier AI Engineering team at Postman.

The idea is pretty simple. Some of the most important problems in AI are not solved in a lab or in a planning meeting. They are solved when great engineers sit with customers, understand what they are trying to build, see where things break, and help make it work.

The Opportunity

Frontier AI Engineers will work directly with some of our most ambitious customers to design, build, and bring real AI and agentic systems into production.

This is a hands‑on engineering role. You will write code, build prototypes, debug systems, make architecture decisions, and work side by side with customer engineering teams to get things running.

You might be working on an agent that needs reliable tool use, an MCP based integration, a RAG pipeline that needs better retrieval quality, an evaluation framework for production agents, model routing across multiple LLM providers, or the identity and policy layer required to safely let agents take actions.

The work spans the full AI stack, from models and inference to agents, APIs, tools, context, evaluation, security, observability, and production infrastructure.

Just as importantly, you will bring what you learn back into Postman.

We do not want to build a collection of one off solutions. We want to understand the hard AI engineering problems our customers are running into, recognize the patterns that repeat, and turn those lessons into product capabilities that can help thousands of other developers.

What You’ll Do

• Build real AI systems. Work with LLMs, agents, MCP, APIs, tool calling, RAG, vector search, structured outputs, multimodal models, and production AI workflows.
• Design agentic systems. Build agents that can reason across tools, APIs, enterprise data, and workflows while maintaining the right controls around identity, permissions, policy, and execution.
• Work across the model layer. Experiment with leading foundation models, model routing, inference, prompt and context engineering, fine tuning where it makes sense, and the tradeoffs between quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Make AI measurable. Build evaluation systems for agents and LLM applications, including task success, tool correctness, hallucination detection, regression testing, safety, latency, and cost.
• Make AI production ready. Work on observability, tracing, guardrails, fallback strategies, rate limits, retries, caching, model gateways, and the infrastructure needed to operate AI systems reliably at scale.
• Solve the context problem. Help customers reason about retrieval, memory, grounding, context windows, embeddings, vector databases, enterprise data, and how the right context gets to the right model or agent at the right time.
• Secure agent actions. Work on authentication, authorization, secrets, API access, policy enforcement, human approval, auditability, and the controls required when AI systems can actually take actions.
• Own problems end to end. Start with a problem that may not be clearly defined and take it from architecture to prototype to evaluation to production.
• Stay close to the code. We are looking for builders. You will prototype, integrate, debug, experiment, benchmark, and ship.
• Work with ambitious engineering teams. Spend time with AI teams, platform teams, developers, and engineering leaders who are pushing the boundaries of what they can build.
• Shape what Postman builds next. The problems you see in the field will directly influence our AI platform, APIs, Gateway, identity, agent capabilities, developer experience, and product roadmap.
• Turn learning into a product. Identify patterns that repeat across customers and turn them into reusable primitives, reference architectures, workflows, and platform capabilities.
• Help define Frontier AI Engineering at Postman. We are early. The first engineers who join will help define the technical bar, architecture, engineering practices, operating model, and culture of the team.

About You

• We are looking for people who are deeply technical and love building.
• People who are just as comfortable opening a terminal and debugging an agent trace as they are sitting with another engineering team and working through an architecture.
• People who understand that building with LLMs is not just about writing prompts. It is about systems engineering, evaluation, reliability, data, APIs, security, and everything required to make probabilistic systems behave predictably in production.
• People who are curious about where models are going, but equally interested in what it takes to make them useful today.
• People who like hard problems and do not need everything perfectly defined before they start building.
• Your background might be in applied AI, agentic systems, AI infrastructure, distributed systems, developer platforms, APIs, security, ML infrastructure, inference, or model platforms.
• What matters more is how you think and how you build.
• We care about strong engineering fundamentals, AI fluency, technical depth, curiosity, judgment, speed, and ownership.
• Above all, we want engineers who want to be close to where AI is actually being built and put into production.

The reasonably estimated base salary for this role ranges from $300,000 to $400,000 plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

What Else?

In addition to Postman's pay-on-performance philosophy, and a flexible schedule working with a fun, collaborative team, Postman offers a comprehensive set of benefits, including full medical coverage, flexible PTO, wellness reimbursement, and a monthly lunch stipend. Along with that, our wellness programs will help you stay in the best of your physical and mental health. Our frequent and fascinating team‑building events will keep you connected, while our donation‑matching program can support the causes you care about. We’re building a long‑term company with an inclusive culture where everyone can be the best version of themselves.

At Postman we value in person collaboration. We are in office 5 days a week for all roles based out of our hubs in San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Austin, New York City, Tokyo and London. For roles based in Bangalore, employees currently work in the office three days a week and will transition to five days per week by the end of the year. We were thoughtful in our approach which is based on collaboration and grounded in feedback from our workforce, leadership team, and peers. The benefits of our in office model will be shared knowledge, brainstorming sessions, communication, and building trust in‑person that cannot be replicated via zoom.

Our Values

At Postman, we create with the same curiosity that we see in our users. We value transparency and honest communication about not only successes, but ...