About the Position

We are looking for an AI Agent Engineer to join our team at Starburst. You will be responsible for designing and building reliable AI agents for enterprise data systems. This is the first dedicated agent engineering hire on the team.

About Starburst

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation. With open standards including Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst enables trusted access to complete enterprise context while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. Leading global enterprises trust Starburst to fuel AI, analytics, and enterprise intelligence. Learn more at starburst.ai.

Responsibilities

As an AI Agent Engineer at Starburst, you will:

Design and build agent architectures: tool orchestration, planning, memory, multi-step reasoning, error recovery
Ship production-quality agent features with clear ownership from design through deployment
Close the gap between demo and production: handle partial schemas, inconsistent metadata, mixed data formats, and unreliable source systems
Introduce proven patterns for agent reliability: structured error handling, fallback chains, observability, guardrails
Build evaluation suites that catch hallucinations, regressions, and grounding gaps before they reach users
Collaborate with the AI Research Engineer to integrate grounding and retrieval into agent workflows
Drive technical standards for agent development through code, not documents
Turn improvements into measurable gains in task completion rate, accuracy, and time-to-value

Requirements

5+ years building AI/ML systems, with at least 1 year shipping agentic or LLM-powered systems in production
Direct experience at an AI startup or AI-focused product team (not consulting, integration, or agency work)
Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or custom)
Production RAG pipeline experience (chunking strategies, vector databases, embedding models, reranking)
Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, observability, CI/CD, code review discipline
Track record of shipping frequently and iterating on user feedback
Ability to Travel: This role will require 25% in-person travel for purposes including but not limited to new hire onboarding, team and department offsites, customer engagements, and other company events. Actual travel expectations may vary by role and business needs.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with enterprise data systems (SQL engines, data catalogs, schema metadata)
Experience building evaluation and observability pipelines for agentic systems
Familiarity with JVM-based systems or polyglot development environments
Contributions to open-source agent frameworks or tooling
Experience with function calling, tool use patterns, and context window management

We Offer

Competitive salary range: $180,000 - $225,000 USD
Equity packages (ISOs)
Comprehensive benefits offering
Flexible paid time off
Opportunity to work with top talent and drive meaningful change

About the Company

At Starburst, we are committed to fostering an intentional, inclusive, and diverse culture that drives deep engagement, authentic belonging, and an exceptional All-Star experience. We believe that diversity of thought, perspective, background, and experience will enable us to own what we do, drive our success, and empower our All-Stars to show up authentically.

Starburst provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

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AI Agent Engineer

Job description