Staff AI Agent Engineer

About StrongDM: StrongDM applies deep tech to hard problems for demanding cybersecurity customers. Our embrace of large language models continues that tradition, achieving useful and reliable outputs from ambiguous and non-deterministic inputs.

About The Role: We are seeking a Staff AI Agent Engineer to join our newly-formed AI Agent team, where you will play a key role in driving the technical strategy, execution, and leadership of projects focused on AI agents for security automation. This is an exciting opportunity to significantly impact the scalability, reliability, and operational excellence of our AI infrastructure, while also mentoring and guiding the team.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development of systems that optimize AI agent performance and scale for global expansion.
• Drive architectural decisions for high-impact projects, ensuring scalability and reliability of AI-driven security solutions.
• Co-author long-term technical roadmaps that set the vision for AI agent scalability, performance, and engineering velocity.
• Set the standard for a culture of engineering and operational excellence in AI development.
• Build and nurture effective partnerships across engineering, product, and security teams to align on AI infrastructure goals.
• Lead and conduct design reviews for critical AI projects with a focus on system-level tradeoffs and AI scalability.
• Drive the design and implementation of “secure by default” AI systems in collaboration with security teams.
• Act as a key stakeholder by engaging with customers and internal teams to understand business requirements and deliver innovative AI solutions.
• Deeply understand how to leverage StrongDM’s software to build and scale AI infrastructure.
• Gather insights into customer needs and incorporate them into technical decision-making for AI strategies.
• Stay at the forefront of technology advancements in AI, machine learning, and security automation.
• Mentor and guide engineers, sharing best practices and design principles for building reliable and scalable AI systems.
• Drive alignment across teams, ensuring roadmaps are cohesive and deliverables are on track.

Requirements:

• Proven experience leading complex engineering efforts focused on AI agent development, machine learning, and security automation.
• Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders and lead cross-functional teams.
• A track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and making thoughtful system-level tradeoffs.
• At least 8+ years of coding experience in languages like Python, Go, or Java, with strong expertise in writing concurrent and distributed code.
• Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, leveraging concurrency primitives, and optimizing AI performance.
• Deep expertise in AI and machine learning systems, with familiarity across adjacent infrastructure domains.
• Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and the ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability.
• A strong sense of ownership and the ability to balance short-term priorities with long-term strategic goals.

Compensation: The estimated pay range for this role is $160,000 - $220,000. Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in StrongDM’s equity plan.