Job Summary

The Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agentic AI will design and deliver core agent capabilities, including policy execution, reasoning, orchestration, and failure-handling. They will build production-ready agent runtimes-state and memory systems, planners, and tool-routing components-while ensuring safety, reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. This role will contribute to multi-agent workflows for classification, routing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and decisioning. The role includes implementing deterministic paths where needed, integrating graph/RAG memory, and establishing strong observability and evaluation pipelines. You will mentor engineers and help uphold high engineering standards across the team.

Essential Job Functions

• Design and enhance multi-agent frameworks and LLM-powered autonomous systems using goal schemas, planner-executor patterns, and well-defined policy enforcement points. Contribute to the definition and implementation of agent state and memory architectures (short-/long-term, episodic, semantic) with strong PII-minimization practices and appropriate TTL strategies. - (20%)
• Implement and refine ReAct, CoT, and ToT reasoning loops, and help standardize their use across agent workflows. Build offline and online evaluation signals using curated golden datasets. Contribute to defining and implementing agent-to-agent communication protocols using frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI. - (15%)
• Measure and improve agent decision reliability using tools such as LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, and Weights & Biases. Design deterministic tool-chaining patterns with appropriate fallbacks, and implement safeguards including idempotency, retries, and circuit-breaker logic. Contribute to integrating grounding techniques to ensure accurate and reliable agent behavior. - (15%)
• Architect and implement safety controls such as scoped tool access, allow/deny actions, validators, red-team hooks, and human-escalation paths. Use AgentSpec to define and apply Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) that prevent high-risk or irreversible agent actions. - (15%)
• Operate and scale production agentic AI platforms on Kubernetes by defining agent-centric SLOs, instrumenting deep telemetry (reasoning quality, hallucination rates, tool latency), and supporting on-call through agent-assisted triage, automated rollback/roll-forward, and human-gated controls. - (15%)
• Establish enterprise safety guardrails, ethical guidelines, and compliance standards to ensure agents operate within legal, regulatory, and organizational boundaries, especially in high-risk or financial workflows. - (10%)
• Partner with Product to shape AI strategy and agent user experiences, and collaborate with data and backend teams to ensure agents access high-quality, real-time data across SQL systems, CRMs, SaaS platforms, APIs, and event streams within existing architectures. - (5%)
• Communicate complex agentic concepts-such as CoT, RAG, and safety controls-to non-technical stakeholders to build trust and organizational readiness. Model resilience around model failures and promote AI-native engineering practices, including prompt design and evaluation techniques, across teams. - (5%)

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.
• 12+ years of experience in Software Engineering including 2+ years in AI/ML, LLMs, agent-based systems or large-scale distributed systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen) and 3+ years of experience implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.
• 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering including3+ years of experience in AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen), 4+ years of experience in Fintech/payments integrations; PCI and data protection familiarity and 4+ years of experience in implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Skills

• Agent Based Modeling
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Datadog
• OpenAI
• Grafana
• Graph Databases
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• PostgreSQL
• Prometheus (Software)
• New Relic
• Redis
• Telemetry

Reports To: Director and above

Direct Reports: 0

Work Environment

• Normal office environment. (Remote or Hybrid), 3 to 4 days per month are required in office if within 60 miles of a Bread Financial location. On-call rotation to include evenings or weekends.

Physical and Mental Requirements

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential job function satisfactorily and meet the physical, mental and work environment requirements. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform essential job functions, absent undue hardship.

• Communicate/Hearing
• Communicate/Talking
• Typing/Writing

Other Duties

This job description is illustrative of the types of duties typically performed by this job. It is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of each and every essential function of the job. Because job content may change from time to time, the Company reserves the right to add and/or delete essential functions from this job at any time.

Salary Range (unless otherwise noted below):
$155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Full Salary Range for position:
California: $178,900.00 - $416,600.00

Colorado: $155,600.00 - $349,900.00

New York: $171,100.00 - $416,600.00

Washington: $163,300.00 - $383,300.00

Maryland: $163,300.00 - $366,600.00

Washington DC: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00

Illinois: $155,600.00 - $366,600.00

New Jersey: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00

Vermont: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Ohio: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Maine: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Connecticut: $171,100.00 - $366,600.00

Virginia: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

The actual base pay within this range may be dependent upon many factors, which may include, but are not limited to, work location, education, experience, and skills.

You must be work authorized in the United States on a full time basis without the need for any sponsorship now or in the future from any employer or organization. The Company cannot offer employment to F-1 (student) visa holders.

Bread Financial offers medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, and other voluntary benefits (including basic and optional life insurance, supplemental medical plans, and short and long-term disability) to eligible associates (regular full-time associates scheduled to work 30 hours per week or more) and their spouses/domestic partners, and child(ren) under the age of 26. New associate elected coverage begins on date of hire (with the exception of disability coverage which has a 6-month waiting period). Six weeks of 100% paid parental leave for eligible parents is available after a 180-day waiting period. Hired associates can immediately enroll in Bread Financial's 401(k) plan.

All associates receive 11 paid holidays. Associates have discretion in managing their time away from work through the Flexible Time Off (FTO) program and may need to notify and receive approval from their manager prior to taking the time off. Associates (except those located in Illinois) receive 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time ("PSST") upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year. Illinois associates receive 40 hours of Illinois PSST upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year and 40 hours of Illinois Paid Leave upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year. Illinois Paid Leave must be used before associates in Illinois will be approved to take FTO.

Hired associates will be able to elect the purchase company stock during offering periods in June and December. You will be eligible for an annual incentive bonus based on individual and company performance.

Click here for more Benefits information.

Job Family:
Information Technology

Job Type:
Regular