Senior AI Engineer ($180K–$220K + equity) Production Agent Systems

About the job This role is being recruited by CoffeeSpace on behalf of a VC-backed AI startup building agentic software for multi-unit businesses. We’re identifying a small number of exceptional engineers who have actually shipped production AI agent systems end to end. If there’s a strong fit, we’ll introduce you directly to the founding team. Job Title: Senior AI Engineer, Production Agent Systems Salary: $180K–$220K base + meaningful founding-team equity, up to 1%+ for the right person Location: Remote within the US, with occasional travel to SF, New York, or Minnesota Employment type: Full-time Company Description: VC-backed AI startup backed by General Catalyst and ENIAC Ventures, building AI-driven products for multi-unit businesses. The company has several years of runway, strong connections to top private equity firms, and an experienced founding team with prior exits and operating experience at scale. Job Description: This is a founding-team seat for a senior AI engineer who has personally built and shipped a complete production AI agent system. Not a demo. Not a prototype. Not an internal tool. Not a thin wrapper around an LLM API. You’ll own the agentic core of the product: orchestration, tool-calling, memory, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, and the systems that make AI outputs reliable enough for real business users. The company works with structured financial data, customer context, documents, third-party APIs, and business logic, so the bar is not just “can this generate an answer?” It is “can this reason, act, and produce trustworthy outputs in messy real-world workflows?” The founding team is experienced and unusually mature for this stage. The CEO previously scaled a multi-unit business to 1,000+ employees and exited to private equity. The co-founder previously co-founded a company valued around $2B and has multiple tech exits. You would join as roughly the 10th hire and sit alongside the founders as the AI horsepower of the company. Why this role is remarkable: This is a true founding-team role, not a narrow feature-building role. You’ll own the architecture and roadmap for the agentic layer and be expected to bring technical judgment, product taste, and pushback when needed. The company is backed by General Catalyst and ENIAC Ventures, with an oversubscribed round, several years of runway, and strong investor and customer access through private equity networks. You’ll work on a hard, real production AI problem: building agents that reason over structured data, business context, documents, and user instructions, with reliability, validation, and trustworthiness as first-class requirements. You’ll have direct founder access, a flat structure, and meaningful equity that reflects the level of ownership expected from this seat. What you will do: Design, build, and ship the agentic core of the platform using TypeScript, Bun, and Mastra. Build production-grade orchestration, planning, tool-calling, memory, retrieval, RAG, evaluation, and guardrail systems. Connect agents to internal data sources, third-party APIs, databases, documents, and business workflows. Create validation systems and evaluation workflows that improve accuracy, reliability, and trust in AI outputs. Work closely with the founders, product, and engineering to turn complex business and financial workflows into intuitive AI-powered product experiences. The ideal candidate: 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong engineering fundamentals and hands-on production ownership. Has shipped a complete AI agent system to real users, owning the full harness end to end across orchestration, tool-calling, memory, retrieval, evaluation, and guardrails. Strong TypeScript proficiency, with experience across LLM orchestration, structured outputs, function calling, embeddings, RAG, prompt engineering, and validation systems. Comfortable operating in an early-stage startup environment with high ownership and low structure. Strong preference for former founders, founding engineers, or engineers who have operated as senior ICs in small, fast-moving teams. Technical undergraduate degree in CS, data science, or a similar field from a top US university preferred. This role is probably not the right fit if: Your agent experience is limited to demos, prototypes, wrappers, internal tools, or one small slice of a larger system. You are currently focused on engineering management and are no longer coding daily. Your AI experience is primarily in a less transferable domain such as Web3/blockchain or voice-AI/IVR without broader production agent work. You prefer clearly scoped tickets over owning ambiguous architecture and product decisions from first principles. Interview process: Initial conversation with the CEO Co-founder conversation focused on product thinking and agent systems experience Technical interview with the Head of Engineering Final in-person meeting with the founders Next steps: Apply via this LinkedIn job post We’ll review and reach out if there’s a strong match If aligned, we’ll introduce you directly to the team If this role isn’t the right fit, we may suggest and make introductions to other high-signal startup roles we’re recruiting for, always with your permission. A quick note on authenticity: This is a real, active role that CoffeeSpace is supporting in close partnership with the hiring team. We don’t post speculative roles and work directly with teams on their actual hiring needs. Show more Show less