Staff Engineer, Agentic

Inflection AI, Inc.; Palo Alto, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 350,000 - 500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Time Off

10 paid holidays

5 days sick leave

Parental leave

Medical, dental, vision with employer

401k matching

Visa support for Bay Area

Job summary

Inflection AI, Inc. in Palo Alto is hiring a Staff Engineer, Agentic to own the platforms and services that power our conversational AI at scale.

You will partner across research, product and infrastructure to enable rapid iteration, reliability and secure delivery for millions of users. You will design and operate backend systems for agentic workflows, memory, retrieval, and tool integrations while driving production-grade pipelines with a strong ownership mindset.

Qualifications

• 10–15 years of backend engineering experience shipping production systems in cloud environments.
• Experience building agentic AI systems in production with real user impact.
• Strong production experience with Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, and major cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) including containers and Kubernetes.
• Experience with LLM patterns: RAG, tool use, evaluation loops, latency/cost/quality tradeoffs.
• Strong ownership mindset to drive systems to production and maintain reliability.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in a related field.

Responsibilities

• Design and build backend systems powering agentic workflows in production: orchestration, memory, retrieval, and tool integrations.
• Operate high-availability inference and conversation pipelines, optimizing for latency, cost, and quality.
• Build internal platform pieces: service templates, CI/CD, observability, evaluation harnesses, rollout tooling to boost velocity.
• Partner with researchers and frontend engineers to design and iterate on user-facing features
• Drive features from prototype to production with measurable user impact, ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

Redis

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes

LLM patterns

System ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in related field

Tools

Docker

CI/CD

Observability

Evaluation harness

Job description

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.

Inflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.

About the Role

As a Staff Engineer, Agentic at Inflection, you will own the platforms, systems, and services that bring our conversational AI to life at scale. You’ll collaborate across research, product, and infrastructure teams to enable rapid iteration, high reliability, and secure delivery of novel AI features to millions of users. Your work will directly impact both the pace of product development and the stability of our production systems.

What you’ll do

• Design and build backend systems that power agentic workflows in production: orchestration, memory, retrieval, and tool integrations.
• Operate high-availability inference and conversation pipelines, optimizing for latency, cost, and quality.
• Build internal platform pieces service templates, CI/CD, observability, evaluation harnesses, and rollout tooling that compound engineering velocity.
• Partner with applied researchers and frontend engineers to design and iterate on user-facing features
• Drive features from prototype to production with measurable user impact, ensuring reliability and performance at scale

Must-haves

• 10-15 years of backend engineering experience shipping production systems in cloud environments.
• Demonstrated experience building, shipping, and operating agentic AI systems in production environments with real user impact not just prototypes.
• Strong production experience with Python, Postgres, Redis, and at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and Kubernetes.
• Practical experience with LLM application patterns: RAG, tool use, evaluation loops, and the latency/cost/quality tradeoffs that come with them.
• Strong sense of ownership, with the ability to independently drive systems to production and operate them reliably
• Have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI/Anthropic Agent SDKs, or equivalent in-house systems) and evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Braintrust, or similar).
• Background in streaming, queueing, or vector data infrastructure at scale.
• Past on-call ownership of customer-facing services with strict SLOs.
• Contributions to open-source agent or LLM tooling.

Employee Pay Disclosures

At Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $350,000 to $500,000 depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.

Benefits

Inflection AI values and supports our team’s mental, emotional, financial and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include:

• Robust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA
• 401k matching program
• Flexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave
• Parental, Medical and Family care leave
• Generous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends
• Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area

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