⚠ Please read first- This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
- You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
- We require US work authorisation, but are open to O-1 or J-1 visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.
About the Role:As an Applied AI Engineer, you'll be responsible for building, refining, and scaling the agent systems inside Sauna, from architecture to evals to deployment.
We care about what works in production: fast response times, predictable behavior, traceability, and uptime.
You'll work across infra, frontend, and product to make sure the agents people build inside Wordware actually work.
A few examples of what you might work on:- Implement multi-step, tool-using agents that hit real APIs and handle retries, auth, timeouts, and edge cases.
- Design agent memory systems that persist relevant state across runs, e.g. memory migrations, context organization, and orchestration state.
- Create agents that proactively do work and send you reminders.
- Own and evolve our eval framework: both automated checks and human-in-the-loop scoring.
- Plus whatever else you see fit.
Who You AreMinimum- 3+ years of engineering experience, including time shipping production software.
- You've built and deployed agent-like systems: multi-step LLM pipelines, tool-using bots, scripted assistants, or similar.
- Hands-on experience with:
- Agent orchestration and memory management (e.g. memory migrations, state organization).
- Tool use and orchestration (e.g. calling real APIs, using plugins, auth flows)
- Evaluation: success metrics, regression testing, and improving agent behavior over time
- You write production-grade code and can work across systems without needing a spec.
- You'd rather ship than polish forever.
Bonus (not required)- Shipped agents that live in the wild, used by customers, not just internal demos.
- Familiarity with LLM ops, tracing, observability, and failure handling.
- You've been a founder or early engineer, and it shows in the bar you hold your own work to.
Compensation & Benefits:Base salary: $180K-$240K + meaningful early-stage equity + health, dental, 401(k), considerable PTO, gym budget, lunch.
The ProcessWe keep our process simple. Exceptional candidates go from first touch to offer within
2 weeks.
- Application: Submit your resume and answer a few quick questions.
- 15-min intro call: Quick check to align on location, motivation, and logistics. If it's a go, we move fast from here.
- System design interview (1 hour): We dig into how you think about agent design: architecture, tradeoffs, and your experience building AI harnesses and agent systems.
- Technical interview (optional follow-up): A coding round testing hands-on engineering fluency and speed, only if we need a closer look.
- Final conversation: Answer any questions and scope out the work trial.
- Work trial: Paid, in-person. Typically 5 days, though we're flexible on timing depending on the role. You'll work on something meaningful with us.
