{"id":241140,"url":"https://alion.io/job/conduit-software-engineer","title":"Member of Technical Staff","company":{"id":5635,"name":"Conduit","domain":"conduit.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/conduit","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":130000,"max":220000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":220000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":1,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-05T10:29:20Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-23","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T06:32:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":52,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":52},"description":"About Conduit\nConduit is an AI agent platform purpose-built for hospitality. Hotels, vacation rentals, and resorts deploy our agents across guest-facing communication and internal operations, running millions of workflows a day.\nHospitality is 10% of global GDP and it turns on customer experience. Resolving a guest request immediately is most of that experience, and resolving one means moving across several tools and between several people. That coordination is the work, and it is what our agents do.\nRole: Member of Technical Staff\nThere is no hierarchy on the engineering team and everyone can work anywhere in the stack. People end up specializing in the product lines they gravitate toward, but that happens on its own rather than by assignment. We want the engineering org as flat as we can keep it.\nWhy this role is different\nFree rein with AI agents, and full ownership of what comes out. Nobody tells you which tools to reach for or how much of the work to hand off. Where to use an agent and where to do it yourself is your call, and how well you make that call is what we evaluate you on.\n\nYou will touch most of the stack and end up owning parts of it. You work across the codebase instead of in one lane. The modules you go deep on become yours, and the team depends on you for them.\n\nThe design decisions are yours to make. You choose the approaches, and the ones that hold up stay in the platform for decades. That is real weight to carry and it is most of why the role is interesting.\n\nYou are directing a fleet of agents. You sketch the work, design it carefully, and the agents execute against that design in parallel. You get a lot of output for each unit of work you put in, and getting good at running that is a skill that follows you everywhere else.\n\nWhat the work looks like\nResponse generation pipeline. The router, orchestrator, and synthesizer that classify intent, assemble context, select tools, generate a response, and decide whether to send it or escalate.\n\nKnowledge retrieval. Models ground their answers in whatever context they are given, so reliability comes down to whether that context is correct, complete, and current. Customer data is usually none of those. You build the retrieval, ranking, and validation that makes the output trustworthy anyway: a hierarchical knowledge base with scope-based queries, contradictory docs, stale articles, and the edge cases that live in one rep’s head.\n\nTool orchestration. The agents modify reservations, dispatch maintenance, send confirmations, and close the loop. You design the tool-use and function-calling layer that runs multi-step workflows end to end, including what happens when a third-party API goes down mid-conversation.\n\nEvaluation and testing. The eval framework that measures quality against real conversations and catches regressions before customers see them.\n\nObservability. The trace that shows what the agent retrieved, what it considered, what it ignored, where confidence dropped, and why it chose what it did. That trace is what lets a CX team trust the system and improve it.\n\nControls for people who are not engineers. The people running these agents day to day are support leads. You make the agent’s behavior legible, testable, and adjustable by someone who has never written code.\n\nVoice. Real-time conversations with transcription and the same tool use as text, under tighter latency.\n\nSpeed and cost. Model routing, caching, prompt optimization.\n\nInfrastructure, data pipelines, integrations, and API work. The systems underneath all of the above.\n\nWho you are\nYou have shipped production systems that real users depend on.\nYou are comfortable anywhere in the stack and pick up whatever the problem needs.\nYou think about retrieval as seriously as generation.\nYou are pragmatic about models. Sometimes the right answer is a frontier model, sometimes a small fine-tuned one, sometimes a regex.\nYou care about evaluation. You do not ship a prompt change without knowing what it does across a thousand real conversations.\nYou want a small team where the thing you push changes the product that day.\nCompensation and Benefits\n$130-220K base\n0.20%-1.20% equity\nComprehensive health insurance and 401k match\nFirst call (20 min) with the founders. What you have built and how you think about running AI systems in production. No prep needed.\n\nTechnical interview (45 min). An AI systems problem: debugging a retrieval pipeline returning wrong context, designing tool use for a multi-step workflow, or working out why a response went sideways on a real conversation. No leetcode.\n\nOptional agent coding session (5 min video). Record yourself working through a problem with an AI coding agent. Not required, and it tells us a lot about how you work.\n\nOn-site work day in San Francisco. Spend a day with the team, scope a small feature together, build it and ship it. Travel and time are compensated. This role is onsite in San Francisco (not remote). Candidates must be authorized to work in the US; we do not sponsor visas.\n\n References and offer.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5054,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":1,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Health insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T10:29:20Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":34,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.617,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":52,"expected_fill_days":37,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":220000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/conduit-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/conduit-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-28T10:01:31Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":13073,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-29T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5635},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5635"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fconduit-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fconduit-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fconduit-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/conduit-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fconduit-software-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":241140}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"conduit.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":241140},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}