AI Engineer Consultant

Description

Cobalt runs AI agents in production that test real customer applications. We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer who has built and operated production agent systems and can help us make them more reliable, secure and cost-efficient.
You’ll set the technical direction for how we design, evaluate, ship and operate agents, and stay hands-on building the foundations our teams use. You’ll work across engineering, product, research and security, mentoring engineers and helping teams turn promising prototypes into dependable production systems.
Your primary focus will be our agent platform and production practices. You’ll also help engineering teams improve how they build software with AI coding agents.
Design, build and operate shared foundations: evaluation frameworks, agent observability and tracing, execution controls, and model access with routing and failover where needed.
Work with security and platform teams to build in scoped permissions, customer data isolation, audit trails and safe execution of tools and code.
Establish practical engineering standards: evals in CI, prompt and model versioning, regression testing for non-deterministic systems, cost and latency budgets, and staged rollouts with rollback paths.
Benchmark models against real workloads and make informed trade-offs between quality, latency and cost.
Help teams use AI coding agents effectively across planning, implementation, review and testing. Measure the impact on delivery speed and software quality.
Mentor engineers and technical leads through design reviews, pairing, internal talks and written guidance. Help teams adopt shared capabilities and improve them based on feedback.
Significant software engineering experience, typically 8–10+ years, with a track record of technical leadership across teams.
Hands-on experience building and operating LLM-based agents in production, with a clear understanding of their scale, constraints and business outcomes.
A track record of improving agent reliability: building evaluations, investigating non-deterministic failures and improving success rates against measurable goals.
Strong knowledge of agent architectures, including tool use, orchestration, planning, context and memory management, and the judgment to know when simpler workflows are sufficient.
Experience running LLM workloads through managed cloud model platforms or direct provider APIs, including rate limits, failure handling and cost tracking.
Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals, including APIs, asynchronous workflows, concurrency and fault tolerance.
An understanding of security risks in agent systems, including prompt injection, unsafe tool execution and exposure of sensitive data.
Evidence of impact beyond your own code: shared platforms other teams adopted, standards that improved outcomes or engineers you helped grow.
We care more about your depth of experience and engineering judgment than experience with any specific tool.

Framework-based or custom orchestration, tool calling and structured outputs.
Automated evaluation harnesses, domain-specific test datasets and regression testing in CI.
Observability:

Distributed tracing, structured logs and metrics for multi-step agent workflows.
Managed cloud model platforms, direct provider APIs and multi-provider gateways.
Experience building sandboxed environments for agents that execute untrusted code or interact with external systems.
Offensive security, application security or security tooling experience.
Experience introducing AI coding tools across engineering teams and measuring their impact.
Public writing, talks or open-source contributions related to agent engineering.

Earn competitive compensation and an attractive equity plan
Save for the future with a 401(k) program (US) or pension (EU)
Benefit from medical, dental, vision and life insurance (US) or statutory healthcare (EU)
Work-from-home equipment & wifi
Make the most of our flexible, generous paid time off and paid parental leave
The salary range for this role is ($200,000 - $240,000) + equity + benefits. A candidate’s salary is determined by various factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, and certifications. It is the Companys policy to prohibit discrimination in any employment opportunity (including but not limited to recruitment, employment, promotion, salary increases, benefits, termination and all other terms and conditions of employment) based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, pregnancy, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical/mental disability, medical condition, marital/domestic partner status, military and veteran status, height, weight or any other such characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. The Company is committed to complying with all applicable laws and providing equal employment opportunities. This commitment applies to all persons involved in the operations of the Company regardless of where the employee is located and prohibits unlawful discrimination by any employee of the Company.
Cobalt is an E-Verify employer. E-Verify is an Internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the Social Security Administration (SSA). It allows participating employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of their newly hired employees in the United States.