Staff Engineer — Agentic AI

### About the Role

This is a senior technical leadership role at a well-funded Series A startup building AI agents for hardware engineers. You'll own the core agent intelligence layer — the system that translates mechanical engineers' intent into reliable, cost-efficient multi-step workflows across complex desktop engineering tools (CAD, simulation, PLM, and more).

You'll report directly to the CTO and serve as technical lead for a small team of AI engineers, a user researcher, and domain expert contractors. This role sits at the intersection of applied agentic AI, user research, and product delivery — and it directly determines the product's real-world value to enterprise customers.

The company serves Fortune 100 customers and has significant backing from top-tier investors. This is a high-impact, on-site role based in San Francisco.

### What You'll Do

• Drive agent task success rate. Own the metric that matters most — define the eval framework, establish baselines, and systematically improve whether the agent can complete the workflows engineers actually need.
• Set and enforce token budgets per problem. Define per-task token budgets, track cost per completed workflow, and ensure commercial viability — not just technical impressiveness.
• Build rigorous evaluation infrastructure. Design benchmarks grounded in real user stories with SWE-bench-level rigor — reproducible, adversarial, and tied to measurable customer value.
• Lead user story mapping and validation. Work directly with the user researcher and domain experts to interview engineers, document workflows in detail, and validate that what you're building against reflects reality.
• Expand workflow coverage. Systematically grow the percentage of top user story steps the agent handles end-to-end, prioritizing by customer value and technical feasibility.
• Translate user stories into evals. Close the loop between user research and agent benchmarking — every val...