Senior AI Engineer, Agents

ChipAgents • San Jose, CA

1d

About The Position

ChipAgents is hiring a Senior AI Engineer to improve the performance, reliability, and efficiency of AI agents for hardware applications. The role spans identifying agent failure modes, designing and running evaluations, developing agent capabilities, and turning successful experiments into production software.

The engineer will work with software engineers, researchers, hardware experts, customers, and founding and field teams across customer discovery, evaluation design, applied research, product development, and deployment. The work includes developing agent tool interfaces, context-management systems, memory, and multi-step or multi-agent orchestration, while moving between experimentation and pragmatic product engineering. The role also involves writing well-architected, maintainable production code and contributing to architectural direction, cross-team initiatives, and engineer mentorship while remaining hands-on.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and operating complex, large-scale production services.
• Strong backend engineering skills, including ownership of system architecture, scalability, reliability, performance, and cost.
• Hands-on experience building production agent harnesses, including tool execution, context management, orchestration, durable state, and failure recovery.
• Ability to diagnose agent failures and turn experimental capabilities into reliable, customer-ready services.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript, with high standards for code quality, testing, and maintainability.
• Clear communication and strong ownership across engineering, research, product, and customer-facing teams.
• Ability to set architectural direction, lead cross-team initiatives, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building agent memory systems, including persistent memory, retrieval, and context compression.
• Experience building agent evaluations, including reproducible environments, automated grading, and regression detection.
• Experience validating and calibrating LLM-as-a-judge evaluations against human judgments or verifiable outcomes.
• Experience optimizing agents through systematic experimentation to improve task success, reliability, latency, or cost.
• Interest in chip design, EDA, RTL, or hardware-software systems.

Responsibilities

• Identify failure modes in AI agents and design and run evaluations to measure and improve performance, reliability, and efficiency.
• Develop new agent capabilities and turn successful experiments into production software.
• Design effective evaluations based on interactions with customers and domain specialists.
• Analyze traces and experimental results to identify bottlenecks.
• Develop tool interfaces, context-management systems, memory, and multi-step or multi-agent orchestration.
• Form clear hypotheses, test ideas quickly, and distinguish meaningful improvements from benchmark noise.
• Move between experimental work and pragmatic product engineering as needed.
• Write well-architected, maintainable production code.
• Set architectural direction, lead cross-team initiatives, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• Full benefits, including medical, vision, dental, and 401(k)
• Two engineering-centric offices with free parking, a private gym, and free lunch, drinks, and snacks
• Equity

What This Job Offers

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