Lead AI Product Engineer - AI Agents & Emerging Products

Job Description Job Description System1 is building the next generation of AI Agent–powered consumer products, and we’re looking for a Lead AI Product Engineer to help lead the effort. You’ll design, build, and operate our most ambitious AI agent systems from early prototypes through production, owning core architecture, reliability, and performance as these products scale. This is a high-impact, hands-on engineering role for a builder who can move quickly from concept to working systems, shipping, iterating, and hardening real agent workflows that deliver consumer value at scale. This role sits at the intersection of multi-agent orchestration, agentic coding, and production engineering, offering the opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI while directly influencing real-world product outcomes and business performance. You do not need prior experience with every protocol or framework listed below—we value strong systems thinking, production experience, and the ability to learn fast in emerging domains. What You’ll Do: Build and operate multi-agent systems that plan, coordinate, and execute tasks across multiple tools and services, to solve real user problems at scale. Implement agentic coding workflows, where agents generate code, run tests, create diffs or PRs, and iterate autonomously within guardrails. Design agent orchestration layers (planners, supervisors, evaluators) to manage task decomposition, retries, and long-running execution. Instrument and monitor agent behavior across success, failure, latency, cost, and human overrides, with exposure to agent-to-tool payment flows as the ecosystem evolves. Collaborate with Product & Design to translate user problems into shippable agent workflows, iterating quickly based on real-world feedback. What You’ll Bring: Strong experience building LLM-powered systems in production, including prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool/function calling, and agentic coding workflows where agents write, modify, and validate code within guardrails. Solid backend engineering skills with Python and/or Node.js, designing APIs, async services, and background workers that support long-running, stateful agent workflows. Experience designing multi-step, agent-driven execution loops (plan → act → evaluate → retry), with explicit state management, idempotency, and failure recovery. Comfort with distributed systems primitives (queues, pub/sub, durable state, rate limiting, concurrency controls) required to coordinate agents at scale. Proven ability to instrument and observe agent behavior, emitting structured events for task success, failures, retries, overrides, and code-generation outcomes. Experience deploying and operating systems on cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), using Docker and CI/CD pipelines. Familiarity with inter-agent communication patterns, including message schemas, shared memory, blackboard systems, or event-driven coordination. Experience implementing agent evaluation pipelines (prompt regression tests, simulation-based evals, automated scoring, human-in-the-loop review). Understanding of cost-aware execution for agents (dynamic model routing, caching, batching, budget constraints). Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, and persistent memory strategies. Exposure to emerging agent protocols (e.g., x402 payment flows, MCP), with the ability to implement evolving specs pragmatically. Who You Are: You operate with high urgency, agency, and a bias for action, translating ideas into working systems quickly, learning from real-world signals, and iterating continuously. You pair speed with rigor, bringing strong engineering fundamentals (systems thinking, evaluation discipline, reliability) so each iteration is meaningfully better, not just different. You embrace a “long is wrong” mindset, simplifying, automating, and removing bottlenecks to consistently reduce cycle time. You think and act like an owner, making sound tradeoffs and taking end-to-end accountability for performance, reliability, cost, and user experience. You optimize for technological leverage, building reusable primitives, tooling, and patterns that compound team output over time. You are growth-minded, working backward from LTV/CAC and prioritizing engineering work that moves activation, retention, conversion, and cost per successful outcome. You excel at constraint removal, unblocking execution and increasing innovation per unit time, including through agentic tool use with clear guardrails and observability. What We Have To Offer: Competitive salary + bonus + equity Generous PTO + 11 company holidays Open sick time 100% covered Medical, Dental, Vision for employees 401k with match Health & Dependent Care Flex Spending Account Paid professional development Leadership & growth opportunities Virtual company and team building events The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $161,800 - $242,700 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in U.S. role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. System1’s headquarters is located in Marina del Rey, CA with an additional office in Bellevue, WA. Employees near office locations are returning to the office. Equal Employment Opportunity: System1 provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.