Senior Software Engineer, Agent

Senior Software Engineer, Agent

Department: Engineering | Location: Palo Alto HQ | Type: Full-time, On-site/Hybrid

About the Role
We're looking for a Senior Agent Engineer to push the boundaries of what AI agents can do at Pika. You'll work on the systems that give AI agents their personality, memory, reasoning, multi-modal capabilities, and ability to act autonomously across platforms. This is the core of what makes Pika's AI products feel alive.

You'll design agent architectures, build tool-use frameworks, optimize LLM interactions, and create the systems that allow agents to learn, remember, and evolve over time. If you're excited about building AI systems that feel genuinely intelligent - not just wrappers over chat APIs - this role is for you.

What You'll Do
• Design and evolve the agent runtime - the core loop that handles reasoning, tool use, memory retrieval, and response generation
• Build agent capabilities - image generation, voice synthesis, video creation, web browsing, code execution, and other skills
• Optimize LLM integration - prompt engineering, context window management, multi-provider model routing (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-source), cost optimization, and latency reduction
• Implement memory systems - long-term memory, working memory, episodic recall, and semantic search so agents learn from every interaction
• Design autonomous behaviors - proactive actions, scheduled tasks, and goal-directed behavior that makes agents feel self-directed
• Build evaluation and quality systems - benchmarks, A/B testing, and metrics for agent behavior, personality consistency, and response quality
• Experiment with new architectures - multi-agent collaboration, planning, chain-of-thought reasoning, and other emerging patterns
• Collaborate with product and design to translate AI capabilities into intuitive user experiences

What We're Looking For
• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years working with LLMs or AI agent systems
• Deep understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations - you know how to get the best out of frontier models
• Experience building agent systems - tool use, function calling, multi-step reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Strong prompt engineering skills - system prompts, few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, structured output
• Proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python
• Understanding of embedding models and vector search for memory and retrieval
• Comfortable with rapid experimentation - you ship experiments, measure results, and iterate
• Product intuition - you understand what makes an AI agent feel "alive" vs. robotic
• Clear communication skills and a team-first mindset

Nice to Have
• Experience with multi-modal AI (image generation, TTS, speech-to-text, video generation)
• Experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI, or custom runtimes)
• Background in NLP, computational linguistics, or cognitive science
• Experience with fine-tuning, RLHF, or DPO
• Familiarity with AI safety and alignment considerations
• Experience with real-time/streaming LLM responses
• Previous startup experience - comfortable with ambiguity and moving fast