Staff Software Engineer (AI Agents) (New York)

Traba is the AI operating layer for the industrial supply chain. We started in workforce—temp staffing, the biggest operational pain point for the manufacturing and logistics customers we serve—and used it to embed ourselves inside their daily operations and create a far better customer experience through technology. Now those same customers are pulling us beyond staffing into the broader operational workflows that run their facilities. That foundation gave us proprietary data from millions of shifts and deep enterprise relationships. But our edge is more than data: by connecting to the systems running across every facility and activating the workers already on our platform to execute against them, we are building applied AI that drives real productivity gains and transforms how the global supply chain operates at scale.We are backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst.You'll build the AI agents themselves—the harnesses, evals, orchestration, and model strategy the rest of Traba's product runs on. We're seeking an entrepreneurial Staff Agent Engineer to join as a founding member of the Agents team and lead the development of Traba's agentic platform—the layer that synthesizes the data flowing through our marketplace, talks to our customers' operational systems, and acts autonomously inside the workflows that run their facilities. (Our Applied AI team puts these agents to work across the product; you own the agents, evals, and model strategy they depend on.) You'll partner with our CTO to make the core architectural calls on how agents are built, evaluated, and deployed at Traba; set the bar for quality and reliability; and bring the outside perspective on agent-building, FDE-style customer immersion, and data-product craft that this 0-to-1 product needs.About YouYou've built agents that survived contact with reality. You've shipped agent systems into production at scale—designed the harness, picked the orchestration patterns, owned the evals, and lived with the on-call—and you have strong opinions on where to draw the line between prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, and code.Domain depth meets technical breadth. You're as comfortable in a warehouse on a customer site as in a design doc—you learn an industry's actual operations (WMS quirks, shift cadence, exception handling) and let that shape architecture.Set direction by shipping. You raise the bar by writing the canonical example, not just the doc—picking the foundational tools, integrating the right model providers, designing the eval infrastructure, and bringing others along.Sweat the small stuff at staff scale. You have strong opinions on eval datasets, prompt versioning, observability for agents, and the line between a clean abstraction and an over-engineered one.You WillArchitect Traba's agent platform end-to-end—orchestration runtime, eval and observability stack, the integration layer to internal and customer systems (WMS/TMS/ERP), and the patterns every agent is built on.Own the foundational technical decisions: model strategy, harness design, retrieval and memory architecture, tool/MCP surface, and how we measure quality.Spend real time in the field with customers and operators—translating what you see into durable product and repeatable deployment patterns.Build evaluation as a real engineering discipline—datasets, graders, regression suites, and experimentation tooling.Hire and mentor the engineers who build alongside you, and set the standard for what “good” looks like.Partner with the CTO, product, and ops leadership on the multi-year platform roadmap.You Have7+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years of hands-on production work on LLM- or agent-based systems.Deep in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js, with a track record designing distributed systems, APIs, and data models on PostgreSQL and modern messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent).Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production agent system: orchestration, tool use, retrieval, evals, observability, and cost/latency tuning.Background that maps to at least one of: vertical AI / AI-agent company, a forward-deployed engineering role, or an AI-native data company. Bonus for supply chain, logistics, or industrial exposure.A history of leading 0-to-1 builds in early-stage environments—comfortable with ambiguity and high-agency by default.Strong written and verbal communication—you can run a customer workshop, write the design doc, and recruit your future teammates.Benefits Start-up equity Competitive Salary 100% Paid health, dental & vision coverage️ Dinner Provided via DoorDash, free DashPass & stocked kitchen for NY employees Commuter benefit Gympass Benefit Additional: One Medical Membership, Gympass, HSA via Optum, Talkspace, HealthAdvocate, Teledoc HealthSalary Range DetailsThe compensation range for this position is set between $240,000 and $300,000, reflecting our market analysis and other relevant considerations. However, exceptions may be made for candidates with qualifications that significantly differ from those outlined in the job description.Equal Opportunity EmployerTraba is dedicated to promoting Equal Opportunity employment practices. We evaluate all applicants without discrimination based on race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other characteristics that are legally protected by local, state, or federal regulations. We encourage applicants from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets.Our ValuesDream Big - We are on a path to change the world for the better. We create and communicate a bold direction that inspires a life-changing vision. We don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.Olympian’s Work Ethic - Changing the world never comes easy. We work harder, longer, and smarter, not just two out of three. We put everything we have on the field.Growth Mindset - We confront the toughest challenges head-on and persevere. Sometimes we fail, but we brush ourselves off, adapt, learn, and push forward with resilience.Customer Obsession - We go the extra mile for our workers and businesses. We remain focused on delivering high-quality products and services that solve this massive and overlooked industries’ problemsJob Applicant Privacy NoticeCompensation Range: $240K - $300KLocationNew York City, NY; San FranciscoEmployment TypeFull timeDepartmentEPDEngineeringCompensation$240K – $300K • 0.13% – 0.24%We bias strongly toward equity, as generational wealth and extreme ownership mentality is optimized when individuals are made owners