Lead Frontier AI Agent Engineer (Applied AI)

Scale AI, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 216,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Scale AI, Inc. is seeking a Senior Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI) to bridge cutting‑edge research and production deployment for enterprise customers in New York.

You will design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured data and traditional ML. You’ll work across a diverse portfolio, building multi‑agent systems, retrieval pipelines, and knowledge representations that enable agents to reason over large enterprise data, with a strong emphasis on

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering, machine learning, or applied AI experience.
• Experience building production AI systems using LLMs.
• Experience with modern AI tooling, including OpenAI, Claude, MCP, agent frameworks, vector databases, or retrieval systems.
• Strong understanding of machine learning fundamentals and modern language models.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work directly with enterprise customers.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in LLMs, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use.
• Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional ML, structured knowledge, enterprise data, and deterministic software into reliable production workflows.
• Engineer customer intelligence layers, retrieval pipelines, memory systems, and knowledge representations that allow agents to reason over large, heterogeneous enterprise data.
• Develop multi-agent systems that coordinate reasoning, planning, tool execution, and human oversight.
• Translate frontier AI research into production systems by evaluating new models, prompting techniques, reasoning paradigms, and agent architectures.
• Own the full experimentation lifecycle, from hypothesis generation to production rollout.
• Design rigorous evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks, online A/B experiments, golden datasets, regression suites, LLM-as-a-Judge, and human evaluation.
• Run controlled experiments and ablation studies to understand contributions of models, prompts, and architectures.
• Continuously evaluate newly released frontier models and determine improvements in quality, latency, reliability, or cost.
• Develop confidence estimation, reflection, and continuous learning systems that improve agents over time using real-world feedback.
• Measure success through business outcomes, not benchmark scores.
• Build production-quality AI systems with reliability, observability, latency, safety, and cost in mind.
• Design agent guardrails, fallback strategies, tracing, monitoring, and evaluation pipelines for safe deployment in high-stakes environments.
• Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to deploy AI systems securely within enterprise cloud environments.
• Build human-in-the-loop workflows that effectively combine AI automation with expert oversight.

Skills

5+ years of software engineering/mL/AI

LLMs production systems

Enterprise customer collaboration

Strong ML fundamentals

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Production observability

Job description

Scale AI, Inc. is seeking a Senior Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI) to bridge cutting‑edge research and production deployment for enterprise customers in New York.

You will design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured data and traditional ML. You’ll work across a diverse portfolio, building multi‑agent systems, retrieval pipelines, and knowledge representations that enable agents to reason over large enterprise data, with a strong emphasis on