Founding AI Agent Engineer

Founding AI Agent Engineer

• Title of Role: Founding AI Agent Engineer
• Location: Irvine, CA, onsite
• Company Stage of Funding: Venture-Backed - Technology, Information and Media
• Office Type: Onsite
• Salary: [To be confirmed with final candidates]

Company Description

We're representing an early-stage company operating at the forefront of AI agent development. As a founding hire, you will join a small, high-conviction team where your contributions will directly shape the product, architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up.
What You Will Do

• Design, build, and iterate on reliable, scalable AI agent systems that are production-ready.
• Architect core infrastructure for autonomous agent workflows, focusing on planning, memory, and tool-use components.
• Collaborate closely with founders and early team members to translate product vision into functional systems.
• Make foundational technical decisions that will define the engineering direction of the company.
• Rapidly prototype and evaluate innovative approaches to agent design, integrating the latest research and tools.
• Own the full lifecycle of features, from initial design through deployment and monitoring.
• Establish engineering best practices, code standards, and team norms as the team expands.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 1 to 10 years of software engineering experience, with significant exposure to AI or ML systems.
• Hands-on experience building or working with LLM-powered applications, autonomous agents, or agentic pipelines.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with a proven ability to write clean, maintainable, production-grade code.
• Comfort operating in fast-moving environments with limited structure and ambiguity.
• A genuine curiosity about AI agents, staying informed about industry trends and developments.

Preferred

• Prior experience in a founding or very early-stage engineering role.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or comparable tools.
• Experience with tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or multi-agent orchestration.

Compensation and Benefits

This role offers a competitive salary and the opportunity to make a significant impact in a high-growth startup environment, where your work will directly influence the future of AI technology.