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Staff Software Engineer

Posted today

robert halfManhattan (NY)

SENIORITY

Lead

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About the role

Staff Software Engineer•Lead the architecture and evolution of custom agent harness, including reasoning and execution loops, planning, tool selection, state transitions, structured outputs, and runtime controls.•Design layered agent memory spanning working context, episodic history, semantic knowledge, and durable workflow state; build retrieval, consolidation, compaction, provenance, retention, and access controls.•Architect isolated, containerized agent execution environments for code, files, and tools, with ephemeral workloads, tenant boundaries, resource quotas, restricted networking, and secure credential handling.•Build resilient agent orchestration: asynchronous tasks, specialized subagents, delegation, checkpoints, resumability, retries, failure recovery, and human approvals.•Create secure, extensible tool integrations using MCP and related interfaces, with authentication, authorization, least-privilege permissions, and safeguards against prompt injection and unsafe actions.•Establish agent evaluation, tracing, observability, and regression testing to measure task quality, correctness, reliability, latency, and cost; drive measurable improvements. Experienced in building and operating production software, with a track record ofleading complex technical initiatives across teams. • Deep expertise in backend platforms, distributed systems, asynchronous execution, APIs, fault tolerance, and stateful services. • Strong hands-on Python proficiency and experience with a modern language such asTypeScript, Java, Go, Kotlin, or Rust. • Experience developing production LLM applications involving tool calling, multi-stepworkflows, retrieval, agent orchestration, or context management. • Practical understanding of containers, cloud-native infrastructure, workload isolation, and secure execution patterns. • Strong foundations in data persistence, caching, event-driven architectures, permissions, multi-tenancy, and secrets management. • Excellent product and architectural judgment: able to evaluate emerging techniques, balance speed with reliability, and turn ambiguous problems into maintainableplatforms. • Ability to influence technical strategy, mentor senior engineers, and communicatecomplex tradeoffs clearly to engineering and product leaders.

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