AI Engineer

Powerline • Palo Alto, CA

22d

About The Position

Powerline is a fast-growing, VC-backed climate technology company focused on operating renewable energy and battery storage assets on the electricity grid. Its technology combines machine learning, optimization, and market intelligence to help asset owners monitor, analyze, and improve operational performance across complex energy markets.

The Lead AI Engineer will design and build an agentic system that can reason over complex data, orchestrate modeling workflows, and autonomously generate insights and decisions for energy asset operations. The role involves developing production-grade AI systems for energy-market experts by combining large language models, time-series data, and optimization engines in both interactive and autonomous workflows. The engineer will help define how AI systems understand and interact with energy assets and electricity markets.

The systems will answer complex questions, explain algorithm results, provide decision support, run continuous proactive tasks without human intervention, and iterate, evaluate, and perform inference using Powerline data and infrastructure. They will operate in high-stakes settings where correctness and reliability can directly affect economic decisions.

Requirements

• Experience building production AI or software systems, including LLM-powered or agentic applications.
• Strong Python skills and experience integrating with APIs and external systems.
• Experience designing multi-step or stateful systems, such as pipelines, workflows, or agents.
• Experience building memory and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks.
• Experience evaluating agents using direct user feedback.
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks such as Pydantic AI, LangChain, or similar.
• Ability to work across engineering, product, and applied AI.
• Strong ownership mindset and comfort building 0-to-1 systems in fast-paced environments.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate across technical and domain teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building systems with partial or full autonomy in real-world environments.
• Experience working with real-time or streaming data pipelines.
• Experience in electricity markets, trading, or energy systems.
• Experience with time-series modeling or forecasting.
• Experience with optimization systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build agentic AI systems that plan, reason, and act across workflows.
• Design tool-using agents that integrate with Powerline systems.
• Develop multi-step decision systems.
• Build stateful and long-running agents.
• Define and implement evaluation frameworks.
• Improve the reliability, observability, and safety of LLM-based systems in production.
• Collaborate with energy market specialists to translate real-world workflows into agent behavior and logic.
• Help lead technical direction for agent architecture and system design.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed