AI Agent Engineer
Position Overview

Valitana is hiring its first dedicated AI Agent Engineer - a founding role that will define how artificial intelligence is designed, built, and governed across our platforms. This isn't a seat on an established AI team. It's the opportunity to stand that capability up from the ground floor and set the standards everyone who follows will build on.

You'll work directly with Valitana's product and executive leadership - a team whose backgrounds span CVC Credit Partners, Ellington Management Group, Eagle Point Credit, Trepp, Allvue, Royal Bank of Scotland, and JPMorgan Chase. You'll develop a deep understanding of our platforms, client workflows, and the structured-credit domain, then turn that knowledge into AI-powered solutions: prototyping features, designing agent orchestration patterns, and hardening the security and governance controls that make AI trustworthy in a regulated environment.

This is a high-ownership, product-minded role with unusual proximity to both the product and the people who lead it.
Why This Role Matters

You're founding the function, not inheriting it. As our first AI-focused engineer, you'll make the foundational calls - frameworks, orchestration patterns, evaluation standards, security posture - that shape every AI system Valitana builds from here. The playbook doesn't exist yet. You write it.

Your work ships, and people see it. On a ~60-person team serving roughly 100 institutional clients, there's a short line between a prototype on your screen and a capability in front of a CLO manager or asset manager. Nothing gets lost in the org chart.

The problems are genuinely hard. Structured credit - CLOs, ABS, leveraged loans - is a complex, high-stakes domain. The AI you build here solves real analytical and operational problems for sophisticated clients, not novelty use cases.
Responsibilities

As Valitana's AI Agent Engineer, you will:

• Prototype and iterate on AI-driven product features in partnership with product leadership across internal tooling, data pipelines, and platform enhancements.
• Design and build AI agent orchestration infrastructure: dispatch patterns, tool use, structured output parsing, memory management, and multi-agent coordination.
• Develop and maintain prompt engineering and context engineering systems that drive reliable and auditable agent behavior.
• Build evaluation pipelines, monitoring, and quality gates for AI agent outputs.
• Implement security and governance controls for AI systems: prompt injection defense, input/output validation, authority scoping, data boundary enforcement, and auditability.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI tooling and frameworks: MCP servers, retrieval systems, embedding pipelines, and orchestration libraries.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams - product, engineering, and business stakeholders - to bring AI capabilities from prototype to production.
• Document system architectures, agent contracts, and operational patterns for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Stay current with advancements in AI agent frameworks, LLM tooling, and security best practices.

What You Bring

Must-haves

• 3-5+ years of experience in software development, with strong proficiency in Python.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar), including tool use, structured outputs, function calling, and multi-turn orchestration.
• A disciplined, engineering-grade approach to prompt engineering and context engineering.
• Experience with multi-agent systems, agent orchestration frameworks, or AI pipeline design.
• A security-first mindset with awareness of LLM-specific risks: prompt injection, data leakage, and authority boundary enforcement.
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly prototype and iterate across a range of AI-powered solutions.
• Comfort working across prototyping (Python, markdown-driven systems) and production (C#, Angular, SQL Server) environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. Documenting agent architectures and system designs is a core part of this role.
• Self-direction and the ability to manage multiple concurrent workstreams in a fast-paced environment.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.

Bonus points

• Experience or familiarity with financial products, particularly structured credit (CLOs, ABS, leveraged loans).

What We Offer

Base salary range for this role is $140,000-$180,000. Valitana offers a competitive compensation package including base salary and an annual performance bonus. Employees receive a comprehensive benefits package that includes an employer-matched retirement plan, healthcare with medical, dental, vision, and telemedicine, and PTO.

Employees in this role will work in the office Monday through Wednesday with the flexibility to work remotely Thursday and Friday.