Workstream

Senior AI Engineer

Workstream • $135K — $160K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Experience building and operating at least one AI agent in production.
  • Strong engineering judgment across various technical domains including APIs, data, and evaluations.
  • Background in customer interaction, implementation, or incident resolution.
  • Ability to dissect complex workflows into defined processes and exception paths.
  • Commitment to high-quality outputs, emphasizing accuracy and verification in AI.
  • Adaptable in a startup environment, with a focus on delivering results swiftly.

Responsibilities

  • Build and operate production agents and workflows with orchestration and data connections.
  • Collaborate with design customers to understand workflows and leverage live data.
  • Create evaluation systems using customer data and establish monitoring protocols.
  • Develop a human-review layer for auditing and escalation processes.
  • Conduct parallel runs against existing processes to ensure accuracy before launch.
  • Transform customer-specific projects into reusable frameworks and playbooks.
  • Manage production incidents and integrate learnings to prevent future failures.
  • Help set the technical standards as the team evolves.

Benefits

  • Mission-driven company focused on empowering deskless workers and local businesses.
  • Early employee opportunity in a Series B growth stage startup, providing significant career growth.
  • Comprehensive health coverage with 95% premium paid for employees and 85% for dependents.
  • Flexible PTO policy for better work-life balance.
  • 401K plan to support future financial security.
Full Job Description


Day In The Life

Workstream is building AI-native services that deliver completed business outcomes-mature service categories businesses already pay for, delivered by AI agents plus a small human review layer at materially better margins than the traditional alternative. We are validating the first service now with design customers from our existing base.

This is a founding engineer opportunity. As the first engineer on Workstream's AI-Native Services (AINS) team, you'll spearhead a new company initiative from zero to one. You'll shape its architecture, set its engineering bar, and help build the team that follows. This is a Staff level role with a direct line to leadership and real influence over how AINS grows. You will not own pricing, deal acceptance, or the margin model-those sit with the Head of Delivery and the Head of GTM. You will own the components: whether they work, how they fail, and how fast bespoke work becomes reusable.

This is a full-time, remote position with occasional in-office visits as needed to support close cross-functional collaboration and key team initiatives.
  • Build and operate production agents and agentic workflows: orchestration, tool use, data connections, deterministic logic, state, and permissions.
  • Work forward-deployed with design customers-sit in their workflow, map the messy reality, and build against live data.
  • Build the evaluation harness: eval datasets from real customer work, pre-launch thresholds, regression suites, and post-launch monitoring.
  • Build the human-review layer: exception queues, review tooling, escalation paths, and the tracing that makes every agent decision auditable.
  • Run shadow-mode parallel runs against the customer's existing process or provider and drive discrepancies to zero before go-live.
  • Turn customer-specific work into reusable agents, integrations, and playbooks-productization is the default, customization the exception.
  • Handle production incidents end to end, and feed every failure back into evals and controls so it cannot recur.
  • Help set the technical bar as the team grows.
Who You Are
  • You have personally built and operated at least one AI agent or agentic workflow in production. You can clearly explain how it worked, where it failed, how you evaluated it, and what you kept deterministic or human-led.
  • Strong engineering judgment across models, orchestration, APIs, data and integrations, permissions, observability, and evaluations.
  • You have worked directly with customers or end users-discovery, implementation, or incident resolution-and communicate clearly with non-technical people.
  • You can break a messy workflow into deterministic steps, agentic decisions, human judgment, and exception paths-and define how each part will be tested.
  • You care about keeping plausible but wrong AI output away from customers: grounded context, constrained actions, verification, evals, review, monitoring.
  • You thrive in zero-to-one ambiguity: shipping weekly, owning outcomes, and doing whatever the service needs-including unglamorous review tooling and data plumbing.
  • Exposure to a regulated domain (payroll, payments, tax, benefits, labor compliance) is a plus, not a requirement.
  • Demonstrated production experience matters more than title or years.
What We Offer
  • A mission-driven and value-based company dedicated to empower deskless workers and local businesses
  • An early employee opportunity at a Series B hyper-growth startup; work with the founding team and industry veterans to accelerate your career
  • Competitive salary and equity
  • Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision. We pay 95% of your premiums for our employees and 85% for dependents
  • 401K Plan
  • Flexible PTO


Know More About Workstream
  • https://www.workstream.us/blog/funding-series-b
  • https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/26/workstreams-text-based-recruitment-tool-gets-a-48m-bet-from-bond-and-beyond/
  • https://techbuzz.news/buzzworthy-august-27-2021/

Additional Information

About Workstream

Workstream is a human resources software company that provides a platform for hiring and managing hourly workers. The platform includes features such as job posting, applicant tracking, onboarding, and scheduling. Workstream's platform is designed to help businesses streamline their hiring and HR processes and reduce time-to-hire. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Workstream
Size
50 employees
Industry
Net Income
-$500,000
Founded
2017
Revenue
$1 million

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