Head of Agent Engineering

Baker Tilly (US); San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Baker Tilly is seeking a strategic Head of Agent Engineering in San Diego, CA to define how the firm’s AI agents are designed, orchestrated, evaluated, and deployed. You will own evaluation harnesses, baselines, and the BT Compass platform, while mentoring a growing team of engineers.

You will lead cross-functional collaboration across Data & AI Platform, Product, Design, and Production Engineering, driving scalable, firm-owned standards and hands-on code reviews.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with production systems.
• 3+ years building and deploying LLM-based or agentic systems in production.
• Staff- or principal-level engineering experience with production agent systems.
• Experience designing evaluation harnesses, baselines, and regression tests.

Responsibilities

• Define and build agentic reference patterns and orchestration standards.
• Own BT Compass end-to-end, including agentic workflows and experiences.
• Lead the Agent Factory, setting high standards for design and quality.
• Mentor engineers in agentic engineering practices and review code.
• Collaborate across teams to translate practices into reusable standards.

Skills

LLM/agentic systems

Python

TypeScript

Full-stack product engineering

Observability & tracing

Cross-functional collaboration

Code reviews

Talent development

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Vector databases

Graph databases

Orchestration frameworks

MCP

Job description

Overview

Baker Tilly is a leading advisory, tax and assurance firm, providing clients with a genuine coast-to-coast and global advantage in major regions of the U.S. and in many of the world’s leading financial centers – New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and Baker Tilly US, LLP (Baker Tilly) provide professional services through an alternative practice structure in accordance with the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct and applicable laws, regulations and professional standards. Baker Tilly US, LLP is a licensed independent CPA firm that provides attest services to its clients. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and its subsidiary entities provide tax and business advisory services to their clients. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and its subsidiary entities are not licensed CPA firms. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and Baker Tilly US, LLP, trading as Baker Tilly, are independent members of Baker Tilly International, a worldwide network of independent accounting and business advisory firms in 141 territories, with 43,000 professionals and a combined worldwide revenue of $5.2 billion. Visit bakertilly.com or join the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

Please discuss the work location status with your Baker Tilly talent acquisition professional to understand the requirements for an opportunity you are exploring.

Baker Tilly is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable federal, state or local law.

Job Description

Baker Tilly is seeking a Head of Agent Engineering to serve as the senior technical leader responsible for defining how the firm’s AI agents are designed, orchestrated, evaluated, and deployed. This role will establish the standards and patterns for task decomposition, orchestration, context and memory management, tool use, human-in-the-loop controls, and failure recovery that product teams will build from. The Head of Agent Engineering will own the evaluation harness and baselines used to guide iteration and inform release and acceptance decisions for both internally developed and third-party agents. This role will also have end-to-end ownership of BT Compass, the firm’s expert front door, including its agentic workflows and product experiences. As the Agent Factory continues to grow, this leader will help build and mentor the team, establish engineering and design standards, and partner closely with internal teams and external experts to advance Baker Tilly’s agentic engineering capabilities. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who leads by building, participates directly in code and design reviews, and translates emerging agentic engineering practices into scalable, firm-owned standards.

Responsibilities

• Define and build agentic reference patterns, including task decomposition, orchestration, context engineering, memory management, tool use, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and failure containment and recovery.
• Maintain the agent pattern library and establish orchestration standards that product teams can consistently build from.
• Own BT Compass end to end, including its agentic workflows and full-stack product experiences, on the intelligence layer built by the Data & Intelligence team.
• Build and own the evaluation harness, baselines, and regression discipline used to drive iteration and inform release and acceptance decisions for internally developed and third-party agents.
• Establish evaluation and acceptance criteria in partnership with Product, Architecture, Platform & Production Engineering, Quality Engineering, and other key stakeholders.
• Partner with Platform & Production Engineering to enable evaluation capabilities to operate at scale in production.
• Lead the Agent Factory as it grows, setting a high standard for agent design, engineering quality, and full-stack product development.
• Conduct hands-on design and code reviews across product teams and mentor engineers in agentic engineering practices.
• Hire and develop full-stack, forward-deployed AI engineers who can build both agents and the applications in which they operate.
• Partner with expert agentic-engineering resources to absorb leading practices and translate them into Baker Tilly-owned standards, patterns, and runbooks.
• Direct third-party and partner engineers delivering solutions against Baker Tilly’s technical standards.
• Evaluate third-party and vendor agents against the firm’s established technical and evaluation standards.
• Partner with the Chief Architect to establish evaluation standards and promote proven patterns into the platform’s shared library.
• Collaborate closely with Data & AI Platform, Product, Design, Quality Engineering, Platform & Production Engineering, subject matter experts, and engineering teams in India.
• Engage in special projects and perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree preferred.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years building and deploying LLM-based or agentic systems in production.
• Staff-or principal-level engineering experience with demonstrated success personally designing and shipping production agent systems.
• Deep experience designing and building evaluation harnesses and using evaluation results, baselines, and regression testing to drive iteration and release decisions.
• Strong knowledge of the modern agentic technology stack, including orchestration frameworks, tool/function calling and MCP, retrieval using vector and graph approaches, and context and memory management.
• Experience with evaluation methodologies, including evaluation design, baselines, regression discipline, confidence frameworks, and LLM-as-judge patterns and limitations.
• Full-stack product engineering experience, including building the applications and user experiences in which agents operate.
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop workflows, checkpoints, review experiences, and failure-containment mechanisms.
• Strong hands-on software engineering skills with recent experience writing production-quality code in Python and/or TypeScript.
• Experience with observability and tracing for agentic systems.
• Experience directing third-party or partner engineers against established technical standards.
• Experience evaluating third-party technologies or vendor agents against internal technical and quality standards.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI and agentic development tools as a force multiplier in day-to-day engineering work.
• Strong ability to collaborate across engineering, product, design, platform, and business teams while translating emerging technical practices into repeatable standards.
• No certifications or licenses required.

The pay range for this position is $250,000 to $400,000. This range represents a good-faith and reasonable estimate of the compensation the firm expects to pay for this position at the time of posting. Actual compensation will depend on a variety of relevant factors, including an applicant’s skills, experience, qualifications, professional certifications, work arrangements, geographic location, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range, and compensation decisions depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. Baker Tilly offers a compensation and benefits package to eligible employees.