Member of Technical Staff - Agent Engineer

Phylo, Inc.; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Unlimited PTO

Lunch and snacks

Team offsites

Culture of excellence

Impactful work in biomedical discovery

Job summary

Phylo, Inc. is seeking a Member of Technical Staff – Agent Engineer to build and evaluate production-ready AI agent systems for scientific discovery. You will own end-to-end harnesses that shape planning, tool use, context management, and recovery from failure, bringing the latest research into production.

The role emphasizes engineering execution, quantitative thinking, and collaboration with scientists and engineers to productionize new agent capabilities for biomedical research.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience building production backend systems, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
• Research or production experience in machine learning, or another quantitative discipline.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, tool calling, agent runtimes, or workflow orchestration.
• Strong quantitative judgment and the ability to determine whether an apparent improvement is real, reproducible, and meaningful.
• Ability to move between research questions, data analysis, system design, and production implementation.
• Experience or strong interest in AI for science, scientific agents, computational research, or automated scientific discovery.
• Experience working in AI-native teams that use coding agents or automation extensively.
• High ownership, clear communication, and strong engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Advance the agent harness by bringing the latest research and open-source developments into production and experimenting with new approaches to multi-agent coordination, model routing, memory, planning, and tool use.
• Build rigorous evaluations that measure agent quality, reliability, latency, and cost on representative scientific tasks.
• Monitor agent quality in production, troubleshoot failures quickly in high-ambiguity situations, and translate findings into engineering improvements.
• Collaborate on reliable infrastructure for long-running sessions, safe sandboxed execution, background work, and subagents.
• Partner with scientists and engineers to evaluate and productionize new agent capabilities.

Skills

Backend systems

ML experience

LLM tooling

Quantitative judgment

Research-to-production

AI for science

Team collaboration

Engineering judgment

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Member of Technical Staff – Agent Engineer

About Phylo

Phylo is an applied research lab building agentic intelligence to accelerate discovery for every biomedical scientist. We believe AI agents will fundamentally transform how biomedical research is done. Our team brings together engineers, AI researchers, and scientists to build systems capable of carrying out complex scientific work.

About the role

We’re looking for an engineer with research or production experience in AI agents to build and evaluate systems that make our agents capable, reliable, and measurably better.

The model is only one part of an agent; the harness shapes how it plans, uses tools, manages context, coordinates work, and recovers from failure. You will own these systems in production and build evaluations to measure whether changes improve performance. The work includes bringing the latest advances and original ideas into production. The ideal candidate combines strong engineering execution with a quantitative mindset and an interest in AI agents for scientific discovery.

What you’ll work on

• Advance the agent harness by bringing the latest research and open-source developments into production and experimenting with new approaches to multi-agent coordination, model routing, memory, planning, and tool use.

• Build rigorous evaluations that measure agent quality, reliability, latency, and cost on representative scientific tasks.

• Monitor agent quality in production, troubleshoot failures quickly in high-ambiguity situations, and translate findings into engineering improvements.

• Collaborate on reliable infrastructure for long-running sessions, safe sandboxed execution, background work, and subagents.

• Partner with scientists and engineers to evaluate and productionize new agent capabilities.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering experience building production backend systems, infrastructure, or distributed systems.

• Research or production experience in machine learning, or another quantitative discipline.

• Familiarity with LLM APIs, tool calling, agent runtimes, or workflow orchestration.

• Strong quantitative judgment and the ability to determine whether an apparent improvement is real, reproducible, and meaningful.

• Ability to move between research questions, data analysis, system design, and production implementation.

• Experience or strong interest in AI for science, scientific agents, computational research, or automated scientific discovery.

• Experience working in AI-native teams that use coding agents or automation extensively.

• High ownership, clear communication, and strong engineering judgment.

We care more about demonstrated ability than a particular credential. Relevant backgrounds may include ML or LLM engineering, academic research paired with substantial software development, scientific computing, or production systems engineering with demonstrated quantitative experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM evaluations, human evaluation, model judges, replay testing, benchmark design, or experiment tracking.

• Experience applying classical machine learning methods alongside LLMs in production systems.

• Experience with task queues, event streams, Kubernetes, code sandboxes, or durable workflow systems.

• An advanced degree or equivalent experience in machine learning, computational biology, physics, applied mathematics, statistics, or a related field.

Why Join Us?

• Competitive salary and equity share in building the future of biomedical discovery

• Full medical, dental, and vision coverage, including free therapy sessions and eyewear stipend

• 401(k) to help you build long-term financial security (US only)

• Unlimited PTO to recharge when you need it (US only)

• Lunch and snacks when you're in the office

• Regular team offsites and company events

• A culture of excellence and speed - we move fast, think big, and support each other every step of the way

• Your work will directly impact our mission to 100X biomedical discoveries through AI

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