Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI
About this role
Bot Auto must bridge the gap between high-level autonomous truck logistics and reliable, deterministic backend operations, creating a need for robust oversight of probabilistic AI models in production. The Senior Software Engineer for Applied AI will design, implement, and operate production-grade agentic systems and business workflows that integrate seamlessly with enterprise infrastructure and developer tools. This engineer will own complex agent orchestration layers, defining strict boundaries between standard software logic and probabilistic reasoning to ensure safe, scalable deployment. The ideal candidate brings extensive software engineering experience with a strong background in both full-stack development and practical LLM integration, remaining comfortable troubleshooting nondeterministic failures and managing end-to-end system lifecycles.
What you will do
- Own the complete architecture and implementation of production agentic products and workflows from initial definition to deployment and ongoing operation.
- Design clear operational boundaries between deterministic software components, workflow engines, databases, and probabilistic agent reasoning layers.
- Build and review backend services, application programming interfaces, full-stack applications, and operator tools supporting agentic workflows.
- Implement agent orchestration components, tool contracts, workflow state management, memory handling, retrieval systems, and failure recovery mechanisms.
- Construct production data architectures encompassing relational schemas, state persistence, caching, event systems, and consistency behaviors.
- Integrate artificial intelligence systems with enterprise tools and internal data platforms while maintaining strict permissions and auditability.
- Collaborate with infrastructure teams to handle cloud architecture, containerization, deployment pipelines, observability, security, and scaling.
- Establish reusable engineering patterns and partner directly with users to convert high-value operational workflows into reliable products.
What you need
- Candidates must have at least 6 years of relevant professional software engineering experience or equivalent demonstrated success building production systems.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience in architecting, building, shipping, and operating production-grade AI agentic applications and business workflows is required.
- Strong backend and full-stack engineering capability across services, APIs, databases, application state, and user-facing web applications is mandatory.
- Must possess strong programming skills in Python alongside proficiency in at least one modern application language such as TypeScript, JavaScript, or Go.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems, relational databases, data modeling, transaction consistency, and event-driven architectures is essential.
- Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, containers, continuous integration and deployment pipelines, system observability, and security is required.
- Deep practical understanding of large language model and agent systems, including tool calling, orchestration, context management, and guardrails, must be demonstrated.
- Must have prior experience resolving complex production issues involving nondeterministic failures, stale context, model regressions, and cost trade-offs.
Nice to have
- Experience with MCP, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent agent and tool orchestration frameworks.
- Experience with Temporal or another durable workflow engine for long-running, stateful workflows.
- Experience designing retrieval-augmented generation, hybrid retrieval, vector search, graph systems, or context-engineering architectures.
- Experience with evaluation-driven development, tracing, model versioning, guardrails, and regression testing.
- Experience leading technical initiatives across teams or working in autonomous systems, logistics, robotics, or mission-critical domains.
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is the team located?
The role is based in Houston, Texas with a preference for that location, or alternatively the San Francisco Bay Area.
What is the compensation range for the position?
For candidates based in California, the anticipated annual base salary range is $160,000 to $220,000. The final base salary will be determined based on factors such as qualifications, relevant experience, demonstrated skills, position level, scope of responsibilities, and work location.
What kind of systems will I be building?
The role involves building and operating production-grade AI and agentic systems, enterprise integrations, and operator-facing tools across backend services and full-stack applications. You will design agent orchestration, workflow state, memory, context, retrieval, and failure recovery mechanisms.