/roles — ROLE_216
Senior Staff AI Engineer
Growth-stage company building AI-native R&D software that helps chemists and materials scientists invent faster
The role
- COMP
- $265K - $310K
- EQUITY
- Competitive equity
- LOCATION
- San Francisco
- WORKPLACE
- Hybrid
- EXPERIENCE
- 8 - 12 years
- VISA
- None, Visa transfers
- STACK
- Python, Langchain, React, TypeScript
- INDUSTRY
- Software Development, AI, B2B, Enterprise, Life Sciences
The company
AI-native R&D platform for materials science and chemistry enterprises, helping scientists digitize lab work and shorten the path from experiment to commercial product.
- STAGE
- growth-stage
- FUNDING
- $40M+ raised
- FOUNDED
- 2021
- BACKING
- VC-backed
JD — the work
About the role
As the senior-most individual contributor on the team building the platform's AI agents, you would own the technical roadmap for the harness that lets agents plan, use tools, remember, and reason alongside chemists. The platform is moving from a chat interface to an agent-first experience, and this 0-to-1 role defines how that happens, drawing on an enormous proprietary scientific dataset no one else can access. You would mentor and direct a pair of junior engineers in close partnership with the heads of product and machine learning.
What you'll do
- Grow the agent framework, a coding-agent-style harness but for chemistry, covering planning, memory, tools, orchestration, and evals
- Lead the shift of the whole platform from chat-style interaction to agents working across every surface
- Encode how working chemists reason and operate into specialized sub-agents and purpose-built tools
- Adopt the newest reasoning models in the product, expanding what they can do, and possibly fine-tune them for science
- Instrument agents with tracing and scientific-task evals, pushing reliability high enough that customers let them act alone
What they're looking for
- 8+ years of engineering experience as a senior, hands-on individual contributor
- Deep experience building production agent systems, including tool calling, memory, evals, and orchestration
- Ability to set technical direction for a team and mentor junior engineers
- Strong Python; the stack also includes LangChain, React, and TypeScript