AI Engineer

Instabase • San Francisco, CA

23d • Hybrid

About The Position

At Instabase, we're passionate about democratizing access to cutting-edge AI innovation to enable any organization to solve previously unsolvable unstructured data problems in their industry. With customers representing some of the largest and most complex organizations in the world, and investors like Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, and Index Ventures, our market opportunity is near infinite. Instabase offers a consumption-based pricing model where customers can pay only for what they use, aligning directly with the value our products deliver. It empowers our clients to explore our AI Hub platform features extensively, enabling them to uncover crucial business insights. This customer-centric model allows Instabase to glean insights from diverse use cases and behaviors, ensuring we deliver top-tier solutions that provide unmatched advantages for everyday business operations. With offices in San Francisco and Bengaluru, Instabase is a truly global company. We are people-first, and we've built a fearlessly experimental, endlessly curious, customer obsessed team who work together and help organizations around the world turn their unstructured data into insights instantly. SuperApp is our flagship AI agent workspace. It unifies communication, collaboration, file sharing, and multimodal reasoning into a single, seamless platform. Powering SuperApp is our Agent Harness —the underlying execution engine that manages agent states, orchestrates multi-turn planning and tool execution, enforces strict security guardrails, and runs untrusted, dynamic code in secure, sandboxed environments. As a Staff AI Engineer on the Agent Harness team, you will design the foundation of this runtime execution environment, enabling SuperApp to act as a resilient, highly scalable, and ultra-secure agentic operating system for the enterprise.

Requirements

• Minimum 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of designing, scaling, and operating mission-critical distributed systems.
• 2+ years of production experience building or modifying agent execution environments, LLM orchestrators, or tool-calling frameworks (e.g., custom runtimes, LangChain, AutoGen, or similar systems).
• Expert proficiency in Go and Python. You have a pragmatic, deep understanding of concurrent programming, microservices, gRPC, and highly scalable API design.
• Strong experience with containerization and virtualization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and a solid grasp of sandboxing untrusted code execution.
• Deep familiarity with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ), caching infrastructure (Redis), and relational/non-relational database design.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, engineering, or equivalent practical systems engineering experience.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience developing developer tools, SDKs, or extensible plug-in architectures.
• Experience with frontend integration (React, TypeScript) to support human-in-the-loop debugging interfaces or agent visual builders.
• Experience working in high-growth, fast-paced startup environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect the next-generation execution runtime (Agent Harness) that drives SuperApp’s planning, reasoning, memory retention, and tool-execution loops.
• Build reliable state machines capable of pausing, resuming, and versioning agent trajectories.
• Design and scale highly secure, isolated, and ephemeral environments (using Docker, gVisor, WebAssembly, or microVMs) to execute agent-generated code safely without putting host infrastructure at risk.
• Build and maintain high-throughput APIs and integration layers (such as the Model Context Protocol - MCP) that connect SuperApp to external services, databases, web search utilities, and complex file processors.
• Engineer robust system-level guardrails to detect and mitigate prompt injection, defend against jailbreak attempts, and ensure strict compliance with system prompt instructions and data isolation boundaries.
• Implement advanced routing, context window pruning, and context caching strategies to optimize LLM token usage, minimize round-trip latencies, and drastically reduce the operational cost of complex agent loops.
• Write comprehensive high-level design documents, align cross-functional engineering teams on the technical roadmap, and mentor senior and mid-level software engineers across the organization.

Benefits

• Flexible PTO
• Comprehensive Coverage: Top-notch medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) with Matching
• Parental Leave & Fertility Benefits
• Therapy Sessions Covered: Mental health matters— 10 free sessions through Samata Health.
• Wellness Stipend: For gym memberships, fitness tech, or whatever keeps you thriving.
• Lunch on Us: Enjoy a lunch credit when you're in the office.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior