Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundations (AI Agent Optimization)

Overview

Lead Temporal's agent optimization efforts within the AI Foundations team, designing tools and mechanisms that help users build agents optimized for token spend and response time while maintaining result quality.

What you'll do

• Work as a software engineer
• Maintain and expand a deep understanding of agentic coding
• Design and build agentic coding systems that can be trusted to deliver high-quality outputs
• Develop a deep understanding of AI application development patterns and techniques, including emerging approaches and architectures
• Take end-to-end ownership of new features, working with other teams to deliver exceptional reliability and a great developer experience
• Work with multiple programming languages: Python and TypeScript, Java, Go
• Serve as a domain expert on AI design patterns, collaborating with field staff to provide best practices and canonical examples
• Work directly with the developer community to debug issues needing expert attention and get feedback on Temporal features and APIs
• Write public technical documentation describing Temporal concepts and APIs
• Go the extra mile to support a customer in need, on the rare occasion that team engineering expertise is needed

What you'll need

• 8+ years of professional work experience
• Proven experience optimizing AI systems using both machine learning and systems techniques
• Experience and passion for harnessing generative AI, particularly for agents and coding
• A deep appreciation for how to use AI to improve quality, not only to increase quantity
• A sense of taste in code and software development practice; approach should be opinionated and thoughtful, but not dogmatic
• Fluency in multiple programming languages, and an affinity for learning new ones
• Deep experience with concurrent programming, including safe use of mutexes, atomics, and other concurrency primitives
• Experience designing APIs and writing documentation for publicly available libraries or modules
• Strong technical communication skills, written and verbal, in English
• BS or MS in Computer Science (or a closely related degree), or equivalent work experience writing production-grade software

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Temporal's programming model (e.g. you've written an app on Temporal)
• A track record of open source software contributions, including contributions to third-party libraries
• Experience contributing to the architecture and design of large-scale distributed systems
• Deep background in machine learning, model training, data science, or machine learning systems
• Graduate degree in Computer Science

Details

• Location: United States (Remote)
• Travel to meet coworkers for a week once or twice a year
• Attending developer conferences is occasional and optional