Senior AI Agent Engineer: Production-Ready, Reliable Agents

Starburst; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Starburst is hiring an AI Agent Engineer to build the AI layer for products like AIDA. You will design robust agent architectures, ship production features, and ensure reliability on real-world data. This is a hands-on role focused on production software with frequent shipping and observable impact.

The role requires shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems, familiarity with agent frameworks, and strong engineering discipline. 25% travel may be involved as part of onboarding and team events.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building AI/ML systems.
• At least 1 year shipping agentic/LLM-powered systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, observability, CI/CD, code review.
• Track record of shipping frequently and iterating on user feedback.
• Ability to travel: 25% in-person travel as needed.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agent architectures: tool orchestration, planning, memory, multi-step reasoning, error recovery.
• Ship production-quality agent features with clear ownership from design through deployment.
• Close the gap between demo and production: handle partial schemas, inconsistent metadata, mixed data formats.
• Introduce patterns for agent reliability: structured error handling, fallback chains, observability, guardrails.
• Build evaluation suites that catch hallucinations, regressions, and grounding gaps before users.
• Collaborate with the AI Research Engineer to integrate grounding and retrieval into agent workflows.
• Drive technical standards for agent development through code, not documents.
• Turn improvements into measurable gains in task completion rate, accuracy, and time-to-value.

Skills

AI/ML systems

Agentic/LLM-powered systems

Agent frameworks

Software engineering fundamentals

Shipping regularly

Travel willingness

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

CrewAI

Semantic Kernel

Job description

Starburst is hiring an AI Agent Engineer to build the AI layer for products like AIDA. You will design robust agent architectures, ship production features, and ensure reliability on real-world data. This is a hands-on role focused on production software with frequent shipping and observable impact.

The role requires shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems, familiarity with agent frameworks, and strong engineering discipline. 25% travel may be involved as part of onboarding and team events.