Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Quick Facts

• Role: Staff Engineer, Applied AI
• Focus: Design and operate an agent platform (gateway, MCP connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost)

Description

Own the design and functions of an agent platform that enables LLM agents to take consequential actions safely and reliably. Partner with internal teams to deliver production-ready identity, authorization, access control, guardrails, and observability so teams can build connectors and agents quickly.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with internal teams to solve day-to-day challenges
• Own the platform roadmap across gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost
• Design agent identity and delegation (user acting on behalf, unattended identities, short-lived scoped credentials, traceable actions)
• Implement fine-grained access control (per-action, per-argument, per-data-class; human approval for irreversible actions; reviewable/tested policy)
• Enforce guardrails at the tool boundary to mitigate prompt injection, confused-deputy behavior, data exfiltration, and over-broad scopes
• Provide observability (tool-call and decision traces, investigator-friendly audit trails, evals for regression detection, per-team cost attribution)
• Raise the bar for connectors and third-party MCP servers (onboarding, review, versioning, sandboxing, safe defaults)
• Operate the platform in production and own on-call (latency budgets, failure modes, rate limits/quotas, kill switches, incident response)
• Partner with Security and mentor engineers contributing to the platform

Requirements

• 8+ years building backend, infrastructure, or platform systems dependent on by other teams
• Recent hands-on work on LLM agents, tool use, or MCP
• Experience shipping identity/authorization systems (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, token exchange/delegation, service identity, policy models such as RBAC/ABAC)
• Attacker mindset for agent systems; ability to explain why prompt-level defenses aren’t enough
• Experience operating gateways/proxies/services in the critical request path, including on-call, observability, and incident response
• Strong skills in Python or TypeScript; daily use of AI coding tools with awareness of limitations
• Proven ability to work with Security and drive safe outcomes with internal teams

Benefits

• Flexible vacation; 10 sick days
• Matched time off to volunteer and charitable donations up to $15,000 annually
• Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage
• 401(k) employer match up to 10%; ESPP
• 100% paid parental leave and family forming benefits
• Development support: MentorMatch program, Udemy courses, and $3,000 annual professional development stipend
• Wellness support: Modern Health mental health support, paid concierge medical, pet insurance, fitness subsidy, commuter subsidy
• Free subscription to Tinder Gold