AI Engineer, Sr. - WFH Role

# Staff Founding Engineer, AI-Native Services ## About the Role Workstream is a mission-driven company building an all-in-one **HR, payroll, and hiring platform for the hourly workforce**. Workstream serves businesses employing hourly workers across industries, including leading brands such as Burger King, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, IHOP, KFC, and Culvers. The company is a high-growth Series B organization backed by Founders Fund, BOND, and Coatue. Workstream is building **AI-native services** that deliver complete business outcomes through AI agents supported by a small human review layer. As the **first engineer on the AI-Native Services (AINS) team**, you will be a founding engineer responsible for taking a new initiative from zero to one. This Staff-level role offers direct access to leadership and significant influence over architecture, engineering standards, productization, and the future growth of the AINS team. You will own the technical components of the service—how they work, how they fail, how they are evaluated, and how customer-specific solutions become reusable products. You will work directly with design customers, build production agentic systems, establish evaluation and human-review infrastructure, and help set the technical bar as the team expands. ## Key Responsibilities * Build and operate **production AI agents and agentic workflows**, including orchestration, tool use, data connections, deterministic logic, state management, and permissions. * Work directly with design customers in their workflows to understand real-world processes and build solutions using live customer data. * Build an **evaluation harness** using datasets derived from real customer work, pre-launch thresholds, regression suites, and post-launch monitoring. * Develop the human-review layer, including exception queues, review tooling, escalation paths, and tracing that makes agent decisions auditable. * Run shadow-mode parallel processes against customers' existing workflows or providers. * Identify and resolve discrepancies before production go-live. * Convert customer-specific solutions into reusable **agents, integrations, and playbooks**, with productization as the default and customization as the exception. * Handle production incidents end to end. * Feed production failures back into evaluations and controls to prevent recurring issues. * Establish and maintain strong engineering standards as the AINS team grows. * Help define architecture and technical direction for a new company initiative from zero to one. * Balance agentic decisions, deterministic processes, human judgment, and exception handling across service workflows. ## Required Qualifications ### AI & Production Engineering * Personally built and operated at least one **AI agent or agentic workflow in production**. * Ability to clearly explain how a production agent worked, where it failed, how it was evaluated, and which parts were kept deterministic or human-led. * Strong engineering judgment across: * AI models * Agent orchestration * APIs * Data and integrations * Permissions * Observability * Evaluations * Experience designing reliable systems that protect customers from plausible but incorrect AI outputs. * Understanding of grounded context, constrained actions, verification, evaluation, human review, and monitoring. ### Customer & Product Engineering * Experience working directly with customers or end users through discovery, implementation, incident resolution, or similar activities. * Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Ability to break complex workflows into: * Deterministic steps * Agentic decisions * Human judgment * Exception paths * Ability to define how different workflow components should be tested and evaluated. ### Engineering & Leadership * Strong technical judgment and ownership mindset. * Ability to operate effectively in **zero-to-one environments** with significant ambiguity. * Willingness to ship frequently, own outcomes, and take responsibility for the technical needs of the service. * Ability to work across engineering, customer workflows, review tooling, data infrastructure, and production operations. * Demonstrated production experience is valued more than a specific job title or number of years of experience. ## Preferred Qualifications * Exposure to a regulated domain such as: * Payroll * Payments * Tax * Employee benefits * Labor compliance * Experience building AI services or agentic systems in regulated or operationally complex environments. ## Work Arrangement * **Full-time** * **Remote** * Occasional in-office visits as needed to support close cross-functional collaboration and key team initiatives. ## What You Can Expect * Opportunity to be a **founding engineer** on a new AI-Native Services initiative. * Direct line to leadership and meaningful influence over technical direction. * Opportunity to shape the architecture and engineering standards of a new team. * Early-employee opportunity at a **Series B hyper-growth startup**. * Collaboration with the founding team and industry veterans. * Competitive salary and equity. * Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage. * Workstream pays **95% of employee premiums and 85% of dependent premiums**. * Opportunity to work on technology designed to empower deskless workers and local businesses. ## About Workstream Workstream is building an all-in-one HR, payroll, and hiring platform designed specifically for the **hourly workforce**. The company focuses on helping businesses and their employees thrive through technology purpose-built for hourly workforces. Workstream is committed to equal employment opportunities and prohibits discrimination and harassment based on legally protected characteristics. The company is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. Show more Show less