Staff Frontier Agents Engineer (Applied AI)

Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with the world's leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI transformation through frontier AI systems that solve real business problems.

Every day, we work with organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, media and telecommunications to build production AI agents that automate complex workflows, help humans, reason over enterprise knowledge, and operate safely at scale.

Applied AI is moving faster than ever. New foundation models, reasoning techniques, agent architectures, and research papers emerge every week. Yet building AI systems that reliably solve real-world problems remains one of the hardest engineering challenges.

As a Staff Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI), you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production deployment. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured knowledge, retrieval, traditional machine learning, and enterprise software.

Unlike traditional ML roles that focus on a single model or product, you'll work across a diverse portfolio of AI challenges spanning multiple industries and use cases. You may build a multi-agent research system and then participate in designing a customer intelligence platform, a healthcare copilot, or an autonomous workflow for a Fortune 100 company.

If you enjoy reading new AI papers, experimenting with the latest models, and shipping production systems that create measurable business impact, you'll fit right in.

What You'll Build

Frontier AI Systems

• Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in large language models, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use.

• Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional machine learning, structured knowledge, enterprise data, and deterministic software into reliable production workflows.

• Engineer customer intelligence layers, retrieval pipelines, memory systems, and knowledge representations that allow agents to reason over large, heterogeneous enterprise data.

• Develop multi-agent systems that coordinate reasoning, planning, tool execution, and human oversight.

• Translate frontier AI research into production systems by rapidly evaluating new models, prompting techniques, reasoning paradigms, and agent architectures.

Experimentation & Evaluation

• Own the full experimentation lifecycle, from hypothesis generation to production rollout.

• Design rigorous evaluation frameworks using offline benchmarks, online A/B experiments, golden datasets, regression suites, LLM-as-a-Judge, and human evaluation.

• Run controlled experiments and ablation studies to understand the contribution of different models, prompts, retrieval strategies, reasoning techniques, memory systems, and agent architectures.

• Continuously evaluate newly released frontier models and determine where they meaningfully improve quality, latency, reliability, or cost.

• Develop confidence estimation, reflection, and continuous learning systems that improve agents over time using real-world feedback.

• Measure success through business outcomes, not benchmark scores.

Production AI Engineering

• Build production-quality AI systems with a strong emphasis on reliability, observability, latency, safety, and cost.

• Design agent guardrails, fallback strategies, tracing, monitoring, and evaluation pipelines that enable safe deployment in high-stakes