ML & Agentic Systems Engineer [IC4]

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential software infrastructure client in their search for a Staff ML & Agentic Systems Engineer. This is a remote, IC4-level technical leadership role focused on building production machine learning systems and multi-step agentic workflows that help engineering teams understand and manage complex codebases at scale.

Our client serves enterprise organizations that rely on AI-powered developer tools to navigate large-scale code repositories, perform intelligent search, and execute coordinated changes across hundreds of repositories. You'll join a small, senior-leaning team that owns several customer-facing AI products, working directly on the agentic systems, model selection, evaluation frameworks, and retrieval pipelines that power them.

Responsibilities

As the staff ML and agentic systems engineer, you will:

• Design and harden multi-step agentic systems that power current and new AI-driven experiences, turning research prototypes into reliable, observable, and cost-effective products at enterprise scale
• Own the full model lifecycle including model selection, upgrades, fine-tuning decisions, and determining when to train custom models versus using retrieval or prompting strategies
• Build pragmatic evaluation frameworks that tell you when changes actually improve product quality, balancing rigorous testing with lightweight smoke tests to maintain shipping velocity
• Optimize retrieval and context engineering to ground models in customer code through effective ranking, context window management, and citation systems
• Treat cost and latency as product features by profiling, distilling, caching, and right-sizing models to ship ambitious features within economic constraints
• Set technical direction for agent architecture, model choices, and evaluation standards that other engineers follow
• Mentor teammates through pairing, substantive code reviews, and raising the team's fluency in building production agentic systems
• Own end-to-end delivery from talking to customers and framing problems through rollout and measurement
• Participate in on-call support rotation to maintain production systems

What We're Looking For

Required qualifications:

• Staff-level scope and impact: You own the most ambiguous, highest-risk problems in your domain, set standards others adopt, and influence direction beyond your immediate team
• Production model ownership: You have personally trained or fine-tuned at least one model and taken it from dataset construction through evaluation, production rollout, and monitoring. You can articulate how you chose between training, fine-tuning, prompting, or retrieval approaches
• Agentic systems expertise: You've designed multi-step agentic systems and made them reliable, observable, and cost-bounded in production. You have strong opinions on where agents excel and where deterministic code is better
• Evaluation judgment: You build representative datasets, meaningful baselines, useful error taxonomies, and release criteria. You know where rigorous evals earn their keep and where lightweight tests suffice
• Cost and latency discipline: You make measured quality-latency-cost tradeoffs using model selection, prompting, retrieval, caching, distillation, and fine-tuning appropriately
• Autonomous problem-solving: Given rough product ideas and customer feedback, you return with plans, prototypes, milestones, and clear tradeoff recommendations
• Strong software engineering: You can ship production services and are comfortable (or eager to become comfortable) with Go backends, TypeScript frontends, GraphQL, Postgres, and Docker
• Mentorship ability: You up-level teammates through pairing, design reviews, and spreading ML/agent engineering literacy
• Customer-driven mindset: You're comfortable on customer calls, turn raw signals into requirements, and push back when feedback would lead products astray
• Pragmatic shipping: You ship the smallest correct thing and prefer robust solutions over complicated ones
• Fluency with AI coding tools: You use agentic coding assistants effectively and own every line they submit
• Async-first remote work: You thrive in distributed, multi-service, fast-paced environments

Preferred qualifications:

• Shipped an LLM-powered or agentic developer-facing product with clear lessons learned
• Fine-tuned, distilled, or trained models to meet production cost, latency, or quality targets
• Experience with retrieval, ranking, embeddings, or search relevance systems
• Direct experience working with enterprise customers and translating needs into product
• Track record mentoring engineers and raising team technical capabilities

Location and hours: Remote. Working hours must overlap with Eastern Time for at least 20 hours per week. Preference for candidates in North America or Europe, though qualified applicants from other locations are welcome.

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team conducts an initial screening to understand your background and match you with the right opportunities. If you're a strong fit, we'll submit your profile to our client for consideration. Throughout the process, we'll guide you through the interview stages and provide coaching.

The client's interview process includes approximately 4.75 hours total: recruiter screen, hiring manager conversation, technical interviews, cross-functional collaboration assessment, and leadership discussion. References and background checks are conducted before final offer.

Important: Please apply only through Get A Job.ai. Do not contact the client directly, as this may disqualify your application.

Compensation

This is an IC4-level position. The client uses zone-based compensation with starting salaries as follows:

• Zone 2: $176,000 USD
• Zone 3: $132,000 USD
• Zone 4: $88,000 USD

Your specific zone and final compensation will be determined based on your location and discussed during the interview process. The role also includes meaningful equity and comprehensive benefits.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai and our clients are committed to equal opportunity employment. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.