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Sail Research

Member of Technical Staff - Agent Engineering

San Francisco
Salary
$200K - $300K
Level
Staff
Work type
On-site · San Francisco

Not stated in the posting: visa.

Open. First seen 22 October 2026.

About the role

Sail is the foundation of useful, agentic AI. We are here to take a big swing at the most ambitious engineering challenge of our careers. Everyone working at Sail will become an expert; nothing less will do in our immensely competitive market.

Inference is just one piece of an effective background agent. Let's design and build the rest of the system, that turns billions of tokens into the best possible answers.

What you’ll do

  • Design custom evals for multi-turn, massively parallel agents.
  • Build agent harnesses to improve open model (Deepseek, Qwen, Llama) performance. Claude Code is all about agent/harness codesign; let's do the same for open source!
  • Automate prompt optimization techniques like DSPy.

What we’re looking for

  • Experience building AI agents.
  • Familiarity with open source models.

Interview process

  • Meet the CTO, who will ask about your experience, and share as much technical detail about Sail as you want to hear. This is the first step because we respect your time.
  • We'll give you a take-home assignment that challenges you to work with agents in a systematic way, and evaluate them clearly and objectively
  • Come in to Sail's SF office for an interview day. Meet the whole team, then present your work, including your process, learnings, and results.
  • Offer. Once the team decides we want to work with you, we make a strong offer quickly and will be quite persistent over email/text/calls :)

Life at Sail

We work out of a beautiful, sunny office in downtown San Francisco. All meals are on us (and actually great; SF is a food paradise and it would be a shame to eat only bowl slop). Everyone gets a Studio Display at their desk. We are serious about investing in anything that saves us time or energy. There are six different ways to make coffee or tea in the office. A friendly (hypoallergenic) black cat named Coco visits occasionally.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 6 open in Engineering. 2 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in May: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

LLM (5 of 6)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Sail Research's own job board.

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