Staff Engineer, Agentic AI
Clera · San Francisco · $160,000–$250,000 (stated in the posting)
About the Role
Lead the development of agent intelligence that helps engineers complete complex workflows across desktop engineering software. You will be a hands-on technical lead for a small AI team, partnering with user research and domain experts to deliver reliable, cost-efficient capabilities grounded in real engineering workflows.
What You'll Do
Own agent architecture for tool calling, state management, error recovery, model routing, and context management.
Define and improve task success metrics, establishing baselines and tracking workflow completion, cost, and failure modes.
Build rigorous, reproducible evaluation infrastructure that translates validated user stories into test cases.
Work with researchers, domain experts, and engineers to map user workflows and prioritize valuable agent capabilities.
Set per-task token budgets and measure cost per completed workflow.
Lead a small team through technical direction, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on implementation.
Collaborate with product, integrations, and customers to align agent behavior with real-world use.
What We're Looking For
At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including 2 or more years building LLM agents that take real-world actions.
Deep knowledge of LLM application architecture, including model selection, context management, retrieval, tool calling, and orchestration.
Experience creating agent evaluation and benchmarking frameworks for task completion, cost efficiency, and failure analysis.
Strong Python skills and familiarity with function calling, tool APIs, observability or tracing, and evaluation tools.
Hands-on technical leadership experience guiding a small engineering team while continuing to write production code.
Experience shipping AI or LLM tools over proprietary engineering data or desktop engineering software.
Experience with desktop automation or application APIs, such as COM, and familiarity with enterprise workstation constraints.
Background in mechanical engineering software, CAD/CAE, PLM, or a related engineering domain.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $160,000 to $250,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.
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