Senior Applied AI Engineer (Agentic Systems)

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a founding-level, senior individual contributor role at a Series A AI compliance SaaS company building the system of record for enterprise marketing and packaging review. The platform automates high-stakes compliance workflows — turning manual, multi-week approval cycles into hours — for large regulated-industry brands.

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer focused on Agentic Systems, you will own the core technical moat: the deterministic orchestration layer and safety infrastructure that makes enterprise-grade AI compliance trustworthy at scale. You are not building demos — you are building auditable, production-grade systems where correctness is non-negotiable.

This is a hybrid, in-office role based in San Francisco, CA (3 days/week in-office). You will work directly alongside a small, senior engineering team at a critical architectural inflection point.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Agentic Reasoning & Orchestration: Design and evolve multi-agent LLM systems that decompose complex review tasks into reliable, auditable steps. Define agent responsibilities, hand-offs, and termination conditions to minimize reasoning drift and maximize consistency.

- Context, Retrieval & Memory Systems: Architect retrieval pipelines using RAG, structured memory, and graph-based retrieval approaches to supply agents with the right context at the right time. Balance recall, precision, and latency across large knowledge bases (brand guidelines, regulations, historical decisions).

- Stateful, Asynchronous Workflows: Own long-running, fault-tolerant workflows using Temporal (or similar), ensuring retries, versioning, and determinism across non-deterministic model calls. Treat agent orchestration as a distributed systems problem — managing state, failures, and observability.

- Evaluation, Safety & Reliability: Build evaluation frameworks using statistical metrics, gold labels, and automated regression testing to prove system reliability. Prioritize correctness and trust, especially in high-risk legal and compliance scenarios.

- Asset Understanding Pipeline: Collaborate on image and document preprocessing (OCR, layout analysis, Vision Language Models) to ensure downstream agents receive structured, machine-readable context.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Required

- 7+ years of professional software/ML engineering experience

- Minimum 2-year average tenure across roles, with a clear track record of career progression and promotions

- Demonstrated expertise architecting multi-agent AI systems: agent role design, multi-step reasoning flows, tool integration, memory/retrieval architectures, and deterministic/auditable workflows

- Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks and stateful workflow engines (e.g., Temporal, Prefect, or equivalent)

- Strong background in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector/graph-based retrieval systems

- Experience building and owning production-grade evaluation and safety frameworks for AI systems

- Startup experience or equivalent experience in CPG, regulated industries, or enterprise compliance domains

- Must be eligible to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

- Able and willing to work in-office in San Francisco, CA at least 3 days per week

Nice to Have

- Experience with vision-language models (VLMs), OCR pipelines, or document layout analysis

- Background in marketing technology, packaging compliance, or regulatory tech (regtech)

- Familiarity with enterprise compliance workflows or brand governance processes

- Prior experience as a founding or early-stage engineer

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Base salary: $185,000 – $210,000 per year

- Equity participation (early-stage, Series A)

- Hybrid work flexibility (3 days in-office, remainder remote)

Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.

LOCATION

San Francisco, CA, United States — Hybrid (3 days/week in-office required). Some remote flexibility on remaining days.

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