{"id":678915,"url":"https://alion.io/job/friendli-software-engineer-ai-agents","title":"Software Engineer – AI Agents","company":{"id":673295,"name":"FriendliAI","domain":"friendli.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/friendli","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":68,"open_postings":17,"ghost_share":0.529,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":128000,"max_usd":252000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1539},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"OCR","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-15T17:37:36Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T23:54:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":198,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":196},"description":"About the Job\nWe’re seeking an Agent Engineer to design and build agentic features in our platform, including document understanding, advanced RAG, and customer support automation. In this role, you will develop not only the agent components themselves, but also the Friendli Agent API, which serves as the core developer interface for building and extending agent applications. You will also build agent applications as production-ready examples of how agents can solve real-world problems.\nThese applications will be primarily written in Python and will serve as reference implementations for our customers and community. We are looking for a hands-on engineer who is passionate about building agent systems and making AI easy for developers to adopt. The ideal candidate is comfortable creating agent applications that showcase what is possible, is curious about and experienced with open-source models, and enjoys turning them into reliable, high-impact features.\nKey Responsibilities\nDesign, build, and maintain agent APIs and applications that deliver document understanding and other high-value features\n\nEvaluate and integrate open-source models to power production-ready agent features where possible\n\nDevelop reference agent applications to showcase workflows and accelerate customer adoption\n\nCollaborate with backend and infrastructure teams to integrate agents with deployment, orchestration, and monitoring systems\n\nEnsure APIs are robust, developer-friendly, and enterprise-ready through strong design principles and documentation\n\nContinuously improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of agent features in production\n\nQualifications\n3+ years of experience in software engineering, preferably in backend, ML systems, or API development\n\nBachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent\n\nStrong programming skills in Python; experience with various Python frameworks\n\nSolid understanding of LLM workflows, agent patterns, or tool invocation systems\n\nExperience designing and delivering production APIs\n\nFamiliarity with open-source LLMs and multimodal models (HuggingFace, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.)\n\nStrong foundations in cloud-native development\n\nPreferred Experience\nExperience with document understanding pipelines (e.g., OCR, RAG, summarization, structured extraction)\n\nFamiliarity with Kubernetes or container orchestration in production\n\nBuilt or contributed to agent frameworks, SDKs, or CLIs\n\nHave worked in a startup or fast-paced environments with ownership and ambiguity\n\nPassion for developer experience and enabling AI adoption\n\nBenefits\nFlexible working hours\n\nDaily lunch and dinner provided; unlimited snacks and beverages\n\nSupportive and highly collaborative work environment\n\nHealth check-up support and top-tier equipment/hardware support\n\nA front-row seat to the generative AI infrastructure revolution\n\nCompetitive compensation, startup equity, health insurance, and other benefits.\n\nAbout FriendliAI\nFriendliAI is building the world’s best AI inference platform that makes large language and multi-modal models fast, efficient, and deployable at scale. We power high-throughput, low-latency AI workloads for organizations worldwide and integrate directly with Hugging Face, giving developers instant access to over 600,000 open-source models.\nWe are a small, fast-moving team doing work that matters at one of the most exciting moments in the history of technology. 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