{"id":1473575,"url":"https://alion.io/job/focused-lead-engineer-agent-academy","title":"Lead Engineer: Agent Academy","company":{"id":699762,"name":"Focused","domain":"focused.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/focused-3","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.643,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Denver, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":85,"max":100,"currency":"USD","period":"hour","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ruby","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"LangSmith","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-29T16:42:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-11T03:29:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":11,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":11},"description":"Who we are:\nAt Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful.\nOur values:\nListen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand.\nLearn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients.\nLove your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success.\nAt Focused, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients.\nWhat would you be doing?\nWriting lots of code\nLead teams through end-to-end delivery across the stack, from backend services to modern web UIs.\nSet the technical direction for client engagements and be the go-to escalation point when things get tricky.\nPair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together.\nPractice TDD and continuous refactoring, and own the testing strategy for the codebase, including deciding what not to test.\nGuide architecture decisions to support scalability, observability, and performance, including deployment, IAM, and observability design for containerized systems.\nCollaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software.\nMap business value to engineering effort so clients can make good tradeoffs.\nCoach developers on the team through pairing, mentoring, and modeling healthy engineering culture.\nDrive incremental process improvement through retros and day to day feedback.\nInfluence technical direction beyond the team, working across client orgs and Focused's internal practices to share lessons, shape approaches, and raise the collective bar.\nStay curious through experimenting with new patterns in the GenAI space, share what works (and what doesn't), and help evolve how we build AI-powered software.\nWe are excited about you, because you:\nYou're a hands-on, full stack engineer with a strong track record of delivering software in collaborative, agile environments.\nYou have experience leading engineering teams and feel confident mentoring and supporting other developers.\nYou're proficient in Python and/or JS/TypeScript (Ruby or similar works too), and you have real opinions on repo layout, dependency management, config, and tooling that you can back up.\nYou've diagnosed and fixed real concurrency problems in production, whether async/await or thread-based.\nYou believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You've owned a testing strategy, from unit and integration tests to regression suites and CI gates.\nYou've designed the deployment, IAM model, or observability for a containerized system on a cloud provider, and you've taken a system through a scaling inflection.\nYou've worked across a range of company sizes, from startups to enterprise, and have experience navigating complex organizations, building bridges across functions, and helping teams adopt modern development practices.\nYou know how to read the room, when to push and when to hold back, and you can handle difficult stakeholders without losing the relationship.\nYou're proactive. You see problems coming and raise them before they turn into fires.\nYou're as comfortable in the code as you are in a client meeting and can translate technical risks and wins into language anyone can understand.\nYou're excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value.\nYou love to share what you're learning and make the team around you better.\nNice to have:\nExposure to LLM APIs or agent frameworks\nExperience building AI-enabled applications with LangChain and LLMs that deliver production-ready outcomes for clients\nDeep expertise in LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith\nAn understanding of how to architect AI-native systems responsibly and effectively\nIf you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have:\nLed a team through building and launching a new client product, from first commit to production\nTracked down a deadlock in a production service and put guardrails in place so it wouldn't happen again\nDesigned the IAM model and observability setup for a client's move to containers\nHelped a client's platform handle a big jump in traffic without missing a beat\nStepped in as the escalation point when a client's priorities shifted mid-engagement and got everyone aligned on a new plan\nRan a retro that changed how the team approaches code review\nMentored a Senior Engineer through setting technical direction on a project for the first time\nHelped write this job req\nWhat to know before you apply:\nThis is a contract-to-hire role. It starts with an 8 week program followed by a one month evaluation period, for a total of about 3 months.\nDuring the program, you'll be required to earn the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification and the Claude Architect certificate.\nFocused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this program.\nThis role requires being in our Denver office three days per week.\nThis is an hourly position for the duration of the contract, with a pay range of $85 to $100 per hour. Final rate will be based on experience and skill level.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6114,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents","AI Consulting & Integration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T17:51:03Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":48,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.537,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":10,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":200000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/focused-lead-engineer-agent-academy","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/focused-lead-engineer-agent-academy.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T04:00:49Z","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","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2265,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2735,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"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":699762},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=699762"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ffocused-lead-engineer-agent-academy"},{"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%2Ffocused-lead-engineer-agent-academy"},{"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%2Ffocused-lead-engineer-agent-academy"},{"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/focused-lead-engineer-agent-academy\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ffocused-lead-engineer-agent-academy"}]}