Staff Engineer, AI Simulation & Infrastructure

Patronus AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Patronus AI is a frontier lab accelerating progress toward human-aligned AGI, based in San Francisco. We seek a hands-on Staff Engineer to own and ship end-to-end systems spanning frontend, backend, ML, and tooling in a fast-moving environment.

You will build agent environments, deploy ML infrastructure, and create internal platforms for researchers. Strong autonomy, product instincts, and a willingness to learn across stack are essential.

Qualifications

• Shipping non-trivial software end-to-end as an IC, ideally at a startup or high-velocity team.
• Strong fundamentals in backend/infrastructure, frontend/product, or ML systems.
• Experience with Python, Go, or TypeScript; ability to adapt quickly in an unfamiliar stack.
• Experience with modern LLMs and agents at the application level.
• Strong system design, reliability, and observability mindset.
• High independence; able to own goals in ambiguity and ship.
• Fluency with AI coding tools and related workflows.
• BS/MS/PhD in CS/ML/SE or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Build agent environments and simulations end-to-end, including frontend interfaces, backend services, APIs, data models, tools, and realistic workflows used to train and evaluate AI agents.
• Build the infrastructure that powers our agent gym, including orchestration, sandboxing, packaging, benchmarking, and systems for running environments across heterogeneous targets.
• Develop internal platforms and developer tools used by researchers and engineers, from backends and dashboards to CLIs, SDKs, review agents, codegen helpers, and workflow automations.
• Build and operate ML infrastructure, including model deployment and serving, evaluation systems, GPU workloads, and the services that make compute accessible to the broader team.
• Own systems from ambiguous idea through production. Define the problem, make architectural decisions, implement the solution, instrument it, and iterate based on how it performs in practice.
• Think deeply about correctness and failure modes. Design for edge cases, adversarial agent behavior, reproducibility, observability, and the messy realities of production systems.
• Partner closely with researchers to productionize experiments and build the software and infrastructure needed to turn research ideas into scalable systems.
• Be a power user of AI coding tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar tools — and build new tooling and automations on top of them when existing workflows aren't good enough.
• Move quickly without sacrificing judgment. Make pragmatic decisions about what needs to be robust today, what can evolve later, and where technical investment will create leverage for the team.

Skills

Backend engineering

Frontend engineering

ML systems

Python/Go/TS

LLMs & agents

System design

Independence

Education

CS/ML/SE degree

Tools

React

TypeScript

Next.js

Python

Databases

Kubernetes

Job description

Patronus AI is a frontier lab accelerating progress toward human-aligned AGI, based in San Francisco. We seek a hands-on Staff Engineer to own and ship end-to-end systems spanning frontend, backend, ML, and tooling in a fast-moving environment.

You will build agent environments, deploy ML infrastructure, and create internal platforms for researchers. Strong autonomy, product instincts, and a willingness to learn across stack are essential.