AI Agent Engineer
Starburst · United States
About this role
**About Starburst** Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. **About the Role** We build the AI layer for Starburst's products, including AIDA. Design agents that let users ask questions in natural language and get accurate, grounded answers backed by their actual data. This is the first dedicated agent engineering hire on the team. You will raise the bar on agent reliability, turning shipped features into systems users depend on. Approach AI agents as production software systems, built with the same rigor as any large-scale backend platform. Ship agentic features that work with messy real-world data, undocumented schemas, and diverse access patterns. **Key Responsibilities** • Design and build agent architectures: tool orchestration, planning, memory, multi-step reasoning, error recovery • Ship production-quality agent features with clear ownership from design through deployment • Close the gap between demo and production: handle partial schemas, inconsistent metadata, mixed data formats • Introduce proven patterns for agent reliability: structured error handling, fallback chains, observability, guardrails • Build evaluation suites that catch hallucinations, regressions, and grounding gaps • Collaborate with the AI Research Engineer to integrate grounding and retrieval into agent workflows • Drive technical standards for agent development through code • Turn improvements into measurable gains in task completion rate, accuracy, and time-to-value **Requirements** • 5+ years building AI/ML systems, with at least 1 year shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems in production • Direct experience at an AI startup or AI-focused product team • Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or custom) • Production RAG pipeline experience • Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, observability, CI/CD, code review discipline • Track record of shipping frequently and iterating on user feedback • Ability to travel 25% for onboarding, offsites, customer engagements, and company events **Preferred Qualifications** • Experience with enterprise data systems (SQL engines, data catalogs, schema metadata) • Experience building evaluation and observability pipelines for agentic systems • Familiarity with JVM-based systems or polyglot development environments • Contributions to open-source agent frameworks • Experience with function calling, tool use patterns, and context window management **Compensation** $180,000 – $225,000 USD + equity (ISOs) + comprehensive benefits
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