Hybrid AI Staff Engineer: Forward-Deployed Agentic Systems

BuddiesHR; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus pay

Medical/dental/vision insurance

401(k)

Paid time off

Job summary

Circana is seeking an AI Staff Engineer to join a hybrid team in Chicago, IL or NYC, NY. The role embeds with business teams to build AI agents, automation, and MCP server integrations, advancing our agent platform.

You will own end-to-end work from concept to production, with a principal engineer and domain experts guiding you. You will tackle production challenges, design toolchains, and push for reliable, scalable deployments while shaping evaluation and observability frameworks across the

Qualifications

• Track record of shipping production software with AI or agentic systems.
• Strong integration engineering: APIs, data pipelines, databases.
• Deep practical craft with models: context management and prompting.
• Fluent daily use of agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.
• Comfort working with non-technical experts; proactive initiative.
• Experience on a major cloud platform; quick learner.

Responsibilities

• Embed with domain experts and engineers to understand real work.
• Decide whether to build deterministic automation, agent, or human workflow.
• Build end-to-end agents: tools, servers, prompts, plans, guardrails.
• Integrate into enterprise systems with limited documentation.
• Maintain evaluation sets, graders, and regression tests.
• Debug from traces, reproduce and prevent recurrence.
• Automate development loops with commands and subagents.
• Advance decisions with working prototypes.

Skills

AI/agentic systems

API integration

Data pipelines

Prompting and tool design

TypeScript

SQL

React

Workflow orchestration

Cloud platforms

Tools

Claude Code

Google ADK

LangGraph

Claude Agent SDK

Airflow

Job description

Circana is seeking an AI Staff Engineer to join a hybrid team in Chicago, IL or NYC, NY. The role embeds with business teams to build AI agents, automation, and MCP server integrations, advancing our agent platform.

You will own end-to-end work from concept to production, with a principal engineer and domain experts guiding you. You will tackle production challenges, design toolchains, and push for reliable, scalable deployments while shaping evaluation and observability frameworks across the