What are the responsibilities and job description for the Sr. AI Agent Engineer position at Greylock Partners?
Summary:
Early-stage investment just opened a search for a Sr. Agent Engineer focused on advancing open-source and production-grade AI systems for document understanding and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The position combines deep technical work with community engagement — developing core agent reasoning, memory, and retrieval pipelines while collaborating with an active developer ecosystem. The engineer will design elegant, high-performance tools that handle real-world data complexity, contribute to open-source projects, and translate community feedback into tangible product improvements. Strong expertise in Python, LLM behavior, vector search, and system design is central to success in this role.
This position also involves bridging innovation from open-source experimentation into managed cloud services and APIs, ensuring a seamless developer experience across both domains. Candidates should have experience with LLM-powered applications, a strong grasp of first-principles engineering, and ideally familiarity with containerization and distributed systems. The employer operates at the forefront of applied AI infrastructure, emphasizing developer experience, modular design, and continuous learning through close collaboration between open-source and commercial product teams.
The best backgrounds for this role typically include AI infrastructure engineers, applied machine learning developers, research engineers, or senior software engineers with a focus on Python systems, NLP, or knowledge retrieval—especially those who have contributed to or built upon open-source frameworks and have a track record of turning experimental AI ideas into scalable, developer-friendly products.
About Us:
Greylock is an early-stage investor in hundreds of remarkable companies including Airbnb, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Workday, Cloudera, Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Coinbase, Palo Alto Networks, among others. More can be found about us here: https://greylock.com/
How We Work:
We are full-time, salaried employees of Greylock and provide free candidate referrals/introductions to our active investments. We will contact anyone who looks like a potential match--requesting to schedule a call with you immediately.
Due to the selective nature of this service and the volume of applicants we typically receive from our job postings, a follow-up email will not be sent until a match is identified with one of our investments.
Please note: We are not recruiting for any roles within Greylock at this time. This job posting is for direct employment with a startup in our portfolio.