Staff Software Engineer, AI/Agentic Systems

Equinix•Redwood City, CA

2d•$186,000 - $280,000•Onsite

About The Position

Equinix is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to spearhead the design, development, and implementation of AI-powered agentic systems within their Developer Experience platform. This role is a critical, high-impact position at the nexus of platform engineering and applied AI. The successful candidate will be responsible for the agentic execution framework, automating delivery, operations, and policy workflows for a large number of engineers. Key responsibilities include owning the end-to-end architecture for building, governing, triggering, and observing AI agents on the platform, encompassing the event-driven backbone, human-in-the-loop queues, agent registry, and policy explainability surfaces. Additionally, the role involves championing agentic development practices and collaborating with engineering teams to promote AI-assisted workflows across the organization.

Requirements

Production experience building LLM-powered agents, including those using tool calling, multi-step orchestration, and human-in-the-loop patterns at scale.
Deep fluency with agentic frameworks and APIs such as Claude/Bedrock APIs, Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, LangChain, n8n, or equivalent orchestration platforms.
Strong experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Apache Kafka, AWS EventBridge) as the execution backbone for agent triggers.
Solid understanding of platform-level security for agent systems, including scoped IAM/RBAC, execution sandboxing, blast radius containment, and audit trail design.
Experience integrating AI tooling into CI/CD pipelines, developer portals (e.g., Backstage), and software delivery workflows.
Comfortable across the stack: Python or Go for backend agent services.
Familiarity with GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
Demonstrated ability to evaluate build vs. buy tradeoffs for AI infrastructure and make architecture decisions balancing velocity with long-term maintainability.
10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on platform engineering, developer tooling, or applied AI/ML systems.
Track record of leading technically ambiguous, high-impact projects from architecture through to production adoption in a large engineering organization.
Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate complex technical concepts for both engineering and leadership audiences.
Experience as a technical anchor on cross-functional teams, influencing without authority and driving alignment across security, compliance, and product stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Prior experience building internal developer platforms, golden-path tooling, or developer experience products is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Architect and build the event-driven execution framework for agent-assisted workflows in delivery, operations, and policy systems.
Design and implement human-in-the-loop approval queues, error handling, retry logic, and guardrail enforcement for safe and auditable agent execution.
Define the execution contract for agent invocation, permissions, and outcome recording across platform integrations.
Lead the platform-native integration of Claude Code into various developer workflows.
Build and manage an internal program to evangelize and drive adoption of agentic development practices.
Partner with engineering teams to identify automation opportunities and convert them into governed agent workflows.
Design and build a governed catalog of approved agents, including metadata, capabilities, trust boundaries, versioning, and usage policies.
Implement lifecycle management for agent versioning and permissions.
Define and enforce the security posture for agent execution, including scoped permissions, least-privilege identity models, execution isolation, and immutable audit logging.
Collaborate with security, compliance, and platform governance teams to ensure enterprise policy adherence for agent execution.