Staff software engineer, AI platform San Francisco

Watershed; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Watershed is seeking software engineers to build an AI platform for measuring emissions and decarbonizing businesses. In this role, you will design the agent infrastructure and develop the observability layer for agent decisions, collaborating closely with product teams to ensure reliable AI features.

The ideal candidate has over 6 years of experience in backend or AI/ML engineering and is proficient in building and monitoring production-grade systems. This position requires in-office work four days per week.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in backend, platform, or AI/ML engineering.
• Experience building products and infrastructure leveraging LLMs and ML technologies.
• Full lifecycle experience building, deploying, and monitoring production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agent infrastructure for Watershed's products.
• Develop observability and tracing layer for agent decisions.
• Collaborate with product teams to define technical strategy.

Skills

Backend engineering

Platform engineering

AI/ML engineering

Production Typescript systems

Model evaluation

Agent observability

Job description

The role

Watershed is building the AI suite for companies to measure their emissions and decarbonize their business. We’re looking for software engineers to help build the AI platform that powers our agents product. You’ll be a technical leader laying the foundations for agentic AI at Watershed – designing the orchestration layer, controls, and tooling that let our product teams ship reliable, observable AI features on top of a wealth of operational sustainability data.

In this role you will:

• Design and build the agent infrastructure that powers Watershed's products
• Develop the observability and tracing layer for agent decisions, making it possible to debug, evaluate, and improve agent behavior at scale
• Build evals, harnesses, and guardrails that turn agent capabilities into production‑grade, dependable systems
• Collaborate with product and other AI engineering teams to set product and technical strategy, and define the boundaries between autonomous agent behavior, deterministic code, and human oversight
• Keep up with developments and state‑of‑the‑art in AI and agent infrastructure to determine what is relevant to Watershed
• Work closely with Watershed product teams to contribute your expertise to build agent experiences across the product
• Write performant, well‑crafted, tested, and maintainable code across our technical stack

You might be a good fit if you have:

• 6+ years of experience in backend, platform, or AI/ML engineering
• Experience building products and infrastructure that leverage LLMs, embeddings, and other ML technologies
• Full lifecycle experience building, deploying, and monitoring production systems that depend on LLMs or other ML technologies
• Experience with model evaluation, agent observability, and making non‑deterministic systems reliable
• Experience building and operating production Typescript systems

Must be willing to work from an office 4 days per week (except for remote roles)