Location: New York, NY
Compensation: $400K to $1M+ total compensation, with flexibility above the range for exceptional candidates
Overview
A technically demanding, research-driven organization is making a major investment in applied and agentic AI and needs an engineer to help define what that looks like in practice. The environment is dense with strong engineers, researchers, and quantitative thinkers, and the mandate is broad: find where modern AI can fundamentally change how sophisticated teams operate, then build the systems that make it real.
The role owns greenfield work end to end. That means taking ambitious ideas from first principles through architecture, implementation, and production, with significant autonomy, real resources, and direct organizational impact. This is not incremental feature work on a mature roadmap; it is the chance to build the first generation of AI systems for an organization with an unusually high technical bar.
What You'll Do
- Design and ship production AI agents spanning orchestration, tool use, memory, retrieval, and multi-step reasoning
- Own greenfield projects from concept through deployment and scale
- Build coding agents and developer tools that materially change how software gets written inside the organization
- Develop reusable agent frameworks, retrieval systems, shared AI infrastructure, and internal platforms
- Rapidly evaluate emerging models and techniques and turn the strongest ideas into robust production systems
- Reason through ambiguous, difficult technical problems where no established playbook exists
What We're Looking For
- Exceptional software engineering ability with a track record of building sophisticated systems
- Deep, hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, agentic frameworks, and production AI systems (required)
- Strong command of orchestration, tool use, retrieval, memory, evaluation, and multi-step reasoning
- Experience carrying technically ambitious projects from concept through production and scale
- First-principles reasoning and comfort with ambiguity
- Exceptional record of academic, technical, or professional achievement
- Intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a very high bar for technical quality
Preferred
The source posting lists no nice-to-haves. Recommend confirming with the client whether experience with evaluation harnesses, agent benchmarking, or developer-tooling products should be called out as differentiators.
Compensation
$400K to $1M+ total compensation for truly exceptional candidates.