Staff Engineer, AI Productivity

Hightouch; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation in the form of ISO options

Remote-first policy

10-year post-termination exercise window

Job summary

Hightouch in San Francisco is seeking a Staff AI Productivity Engineer to enhance the productivity of AI coding tools across their engineering organization. You will focus on building infrastructure and tooling that significantly improves the effectiveness of AI agents. If you enjoy solving complex technical problems in a dynamic startup culture and have a track record of impactful engineering work, we would like to hear from you.

The role offers a salary range of $180,000 - $400,000 yearly, along with equity compensation, and various opportunities for impact and growth within a mission-driven team.

Qualifications

• Engineer with passion for solving technical problems.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Experience writing effective agent documentation.

Responsibilities

• Build infrastructure and tooling for AI coding tools.
• Ensure agents can operate in cloud-based environments.
• Work with engineers to improve agent productivity.

Skills

Strong software engineering fundamentals

Deep hands-on experience with AI coding agents

Effective agent documentation writing

Building developer tools or infrastructure

Tools

TypeScript/JavaScript

Go

GraphQL

Job description

About Hightouch

Hightouch is an Agentic Marketing Platform powered by the industry-leading Composable CDP. With complete brand context, customer data, and performance history in one place, every marketer finally has the power to build and ship end-to-end campaigns themselves. Teams move faster, stay on brand, and get AI marketing that actually works.

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in San Francisco, Hightouch enables marketing teams to analyze performance, brainstorm ideas, and generate creative at a speed and quality that wasn't previously possible. Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Customer Data Platforms, Hightouch is trusted by leading enterprises like Domino's, Spotify, Aritzia, Cars.com, Ramp, and PetSmart. At Hightouch, our mission is to help our customers leverage data and AI to grow their businesses. The team is ambitious, impact-driven, efficient — and we believe humility, kindness, and compassion are essential to our success. If you're energized by velocity, obsessed with raising the bar, and want to build alongside people who care deeply about each other and our customers, we'd love to meet you.

About The Role

We are looking for a Staff AI Productivity Engineer to accelerate how our engineering organization works with AI coding tools. This is a hands‑on technical role focused on building infrastructure, tooling, and documentation that makes AI agents dramatically more effective across our codebase. AI tools are evolving rapidly, and we believe the companies that invest in making agents truly productive — not just available — will have a significant advantage. You'll own this problem end-to-end: from setting up cloud development environments where agents can run autonomously, to building MCP integrations that give agents access to our internal systems, to creating the documentation and context that helps agents understand how we build software. You’ll have the hands‑on acumen to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself and the leadership skills to drive cross‑team efforts to raise the bar everywhere. This role is a companion role to our Developer Productivity role but has a distinct focus: while Dev Productivity owns the build/test/deploy pipeline, you'll own the AI‑assisted development experience. An exceptional candidate could wear both hats.

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Own the agentic development environment: Ensure agents can operate in independent cloud‑based development environments, execute our full test suites, examine build results visually, etc.
• Build our tooling integrations: Build MCP server integrations that connect our agents to the systems needed to build and debug software, such as CircleCI, Slack, Datadog, GitHub, etc.
• Documentation and context: Own our repo‑wide agents.md file and work with teams to ensure our library of agent guidance and skills is continually pushing the bar. Ensure our conventions and package structures are exposed in ways that agents can effectively use.
• Enablement: Work with our engineers to understand where agents are struggling and address root causes such as better docs, tooling access, etc. Develop tooling for non‑engineers to make simple visual updates to our application.
• Serve as a “PM” for internal AI agents: Consistently keep us on the leading edge of AI productivity trends by staying abreast of what is state‑of‑the‑art in industry and driving those improvements across Hightouch.

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $180,000 - $400,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote‑first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options, and offer early exercise and a 10 year post‑termination exercise window.

About You

You are an engineer with a passion for solving hard technical problems that generate real value for customers. You’re motivated by high ownership and are comfortable in a fast‑paced, startup environment.

Must have

• Strong software engineering fundamentals—you can dive into complex backend code and understand it quickly.
• Deep hands‑on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Devin, or similar).
• Experience writing effective agent documentation, custom instructions, or context files that meaningfully improved agent output.
• Track record of building developer tools or infrastructure that other engineers actually use.Comfortable working across the stack: you'll touch CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, internal tooling, and application code.

Nice to have

• Experience building or contributing to MCP servers or similar agent‑tooling integrations.
• Background in developer productivity, platform engineering, or developer experience roles.
• Experience with our stack: TypeScript/JavaScript monorepos, Go, GraphQL.
• You’ve set up sandboxed or containerized development environments at scale.

Interview Process

• Apply: Curl jobapi.hightouchdata.com on port 13784 and have followed those instructions before applying. It’ll only take a minute!
• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [45m]: Designing a data processing feature end‑to‑end.
• AI Skills Interview [60m]: We’ll dive into how you leverage AI and how you’ve helped others do the same.
• Hiring Manager Interview [45m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.

E-Verify Statement

Hightouch participates in E-Verify. After you join the team, we'll verify your eligibility to work in the U.S. by submitting information from your Form I-9 to the Social Security Administration and, if needed, the Department of Homeland Security. This process happens post‑hire only — we never use E-Verify to pre‑screen applicants.

E-Verify Notice

E-Verify Notice (Spanish)

Right to Work Notice

Right to Work Notice (Spanish)