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About This Role
We're hiring for our partner company, an early-stage startup building an AI coworker: an agent that lives inside a team's everyday tools and actually gets work done. They need a senior Founding Harness Engineer to build the layer that makes it behave. How it pulls in context, when it speaks up, which tool it reaches for, when it stops and asks permission, and how it finishes a long task without falling over halfway. You'll join a seasoned founder and a founding team who spent years building technology in the services world. They watched clients ask for agents long before anyone could deliver them, so they know where the real demand is. The role starts as a contract, with a path to full-time once it's clearly working for both sides. It is remote-friendly anywhere in the US, and hours that overlap with Pacific time will make the founder very happy. If you've shipped tool-using agents to real users and want to build the next one from day one, read on.
Our Culture & Values (read before applying)
We move fast. We take ownership. We work with AI, not against it. And we expect everyone to bring ideas, not wait for instructions.
There are no daily checklists, no micromanagement, and no corporate politics. You get autonomy, trust, and a small team that's always ready to help you grow. Here, impact matters more than titles, and curiosity matters more than seniority.
If you want to level up fast and see your work in real users' hands - welcome aboard.
Responsibilities
- Build the agent runtime: context, tool choice, approval waits, and knowing when to act, ask, or stay quiet
- Write and keep tuning the system prompts. Proactive is great. Spamming the team channel is not
- Own the eval and regression harness. Prompt changes are code, so they get tested like code
- Make long-running work survive interruptions, retries, and the occasional flaky API
- Put the guardrails in: approval gates for risky actions and strict separation between customers' data
- Work directly with the founder and early users, and turn what you hear into shipped behavior
Requirements
- You’ve shipped tool-using LLM agents to real users in production. Demos and prompt wrappers don’t count
- Good instincts for agent initiative, and the test results to back them up
- Hands-on experience building eval and regression suites for LLM behavior
- You understand safe tool execution, prompt injection, and multi-tenant data risk
- Solid backend skills in Python or TypeScript (async jobs, retries, state)
- You take a fuzzy problem from prototype to production and can explain the tradeoffs along the way
- Excellent written and verbal communication; you can explain a tradeoff to a founder or a user without a whiteboard
Nice to have
- MCP, or integrations with tools like Slack, Gmail, Notion, or Linear
- Eval and tracing tools such as Braintrust, Langfuse, or LangSmith
- You’ve been an early engineer at a startup before and still liked it
Benefits
- A founding seat. You own the agent harness and shape how the product behaves
- Competitive compensation + equity
- A direct line to the founder and early users, with no layers in between
- Remote anywhere in the US, ideally keeping hours that overlap with Pacific time
- The tools and models you need to do the job properly
- A small, experienced team that trusts you to run your own work
Role Details
About This Role
AI Agent Developers build autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and take actions. They design multi-step workflows, tool-use frameworks, and orchestration layers that let LLMs interact with external systems. This is the frontier of applied AI engineering.
Agent development is where the most interesting (and hardest) problems in applied AI live right now. Making an LLM answer a question is straightforward. Making it reliably execute a 15-step workflow that involves calling APIs, reading databases, making decisions, and recovering from errors is an unsolved problem. You're building systems that have to work despite the fact that the underlying model is non-deterministic.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI Agent Developer positions make up 1% of the market. At Bolder Apps, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: designing the action space and tool definitions for a new agent use case, debugging why the agent chose the wrong action sequence on a specific input, building evaluation frameworks that test agent reliability across hundreds of scenarios, optimizing the prompt chain for cost and latency, and implementing safety guardrails to prevent the agent from taking destructive actions. The work is equal parts engineering and empirical science.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
Skills Required
Deep experience with LLM APIs and agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen). Strong understanding of prompt engineering, function calling, and error handling for non-deterministic systems. Python is standard. Experience with orchestration patterns, state management, and workflow engines adds significant value.
The best agent developers think like systems engineers. They design for failure modes, build observability into every step, and understand that agent reliability is the product. Expertise in evaluation methodology for non-deterministic systems is the differentiator. Can you measure whether your agent works 'well enough'? Can you find the edge cases where it breaks?
Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Agent Developer roles pay a median of $215,000 based on 203 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Bolder Apps AI Hiring
Bolder Apps has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Agent Developer. Based in US.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $209,100 across 306 tracked positions.
Career Path
Common paths into AI Agent Developer roles include Software Engineer, LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward AI Architect, Principal Engineer, Head of AI Engineering.
Build agents. That's the portfolio. Take an open-source agent framework, build something that completes a non-trivial multi-step task, evaluate it rigorously, and document what you learned about reliability, cost, and failure modes. The field is new enough that practical experience counts for more than credentials.
What to Expect in Interviews
Interviews focus on systems thinking and reliability engineering. Expect questions about agent architecture: how you'd design a multi-step workflow with error recovery, how you'd evaluate agent performance, and how you'd prevent agents from taking destructive actions. Coding exercises often involve building a simple agent with tool use and evaluating its behavior across different scenarios. Discussion of safety and guardrails is increasingly common.
When evaluating opportunities: Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
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