C3 AI is building the platform that makes autonomous intelligence reliable in the real world. We are looking for a senior software engineer to help build the C3 Agentic AI Platform - the system on which AI agents observe, reason, decide, and act on live operational data across critical industries such as manufacturing, energy, defense, and healthcare. This is production AI where wrong actions have real consequences, so the bar is accuracy, performance, and safety you can measure.
The ideal candidate has a strong computer science and mathematics background and has built scalable software systems that ran in production. You thrive in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment, communicate clearly, and hold a high bar without ego. You also treat curiosity as a survival skill: the models, tools, and techniques in this space change monthly, and you want to learn faster than the market.
As a C3 Agentic AI Platform engineering team member, you will closely collaborate with product owners and data scientists and be responsible for the entire software engineering lifecycle. Our agents do not run in toy environments; they operate where mistakes can break equipment, delay missions, or create safety risk. Agent accuracy, performance, and safety are the product itself - not compliance cleanup - and everything you build must be measurable, explainable, and reliable in production.
Responsibilities- Architect and build the systems, tools, and frameworks that let data scientists and developers create, deploy, and operate agentic AI applications on the C3 Agentic AI Platform - applying sound design principles to ground agents in governed enterprise data and run them on reliable, scalable runtimes and end-to-end pipelines in a distributed system.
- Advance agent accuracy: build the evaluations, grounding, and feedback loops that measure and improve correctness, reduce hallucination, and track override rates in production.
- Drive agent performance: optimize latency, throughput, scalability, and inference cost across the platform.
- Strengthen agent safety: implement inherited permissions, guardrails, human-approval and escalation paths, auditability, and rollback so that autonomy stays bounded and is earned one workflow at a time.
- Collaborate with and support data scientists to understand the utility of the C3 Agentic AI Platform and define new requirements.
- Work with product owners to define and lead the development of longer-term platform capabilities.
- Mentor junior members of the team.
Qualifications- Advanced degree in computer science, math, or a similar field.
- Strong command of software architecture and design principles, with a track record of designing scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems and making architectural trade-offs deliberately.
- Thorough knowledge of data structures, algorithms, profiling/optimization, and Object-Oriented and Functional Programming.
- Strong programming skills in Java, Python, and JavaScript.
- High proficiency with agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) - going beyond individual tool use to orchestrate engineering workflows across multiple agents working in parallel. You decompose work, delegate to and coordinate several coding agents at once, and review their output with the judgment to catch subtle bugs, security issues, and architectural drift, all while collaborating closely with teammates and keeping code correct, secure, and maintainable.
- In-depth understanding of machine learning algorithms; familiarity with LLMs and AI agent architectures is a strong plus.
- Proven track record of applying machine learning or AI in a production system.
- Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of projects, including making key design decisions and understanding the tradeoffs.
- A minimum of 5 years of work experience in a fast-paced software company.
Growth and learning- Work at the frontier of agent reliability - evaluations, grounding, guardrails, orchestration, and inference performance at enterprise scale - and build expertise that is scarce and in demand.
- Learn from a high-bar team and help others do the same. Technical disagreement is welcome here, and the best idea wins, even when it comes from the newest person in the room.
- Grow as an engineer without being pushed into management - senior individual-contributor, agent, and domain-expertise paths are real and respected.
- C3 AI invests in your education, including funding a fully-online master's degree in computer science (with a cash bonus, raise, and stock grant on completion), plus ongoing training and bonuses for completing select courses.
You'll thrive here if- You would rather ship a reliable agent than a beautiful demo.
- You want your work measured by real outcomes, not activity or effort.
- You give and take direct feedback well, and you commit fully once a decision is made.
- You use AI as a teammate - you direct coding agents daily and stay accountable for what they ship.
C3 AI provides excellent benefits, a competitive compensation package and generous equity plan.
California Base Pay Range
$160,000-$219,000 USD
