Staff Applied AI Engineer, Agentic Systems

Beacon AI is a fast-moving team of aviators, engineers, and operators building an AI platform to make flying safer, more efficient, and more capable. The role sits at the intersection of agentic AI, information retrieval, and production software engineering. The engineer will design and build AI-powered systems that help aviation professionals navigate complex, high-stakes operational decisions, taking systems from experimental prototypes to dependable production services. This is a hybrid role based in San Carlos, CA, with 3+ days per week onsite and the option to work remotely on remaining days.

Responsibilities

Design and implement agent architectures involving tool use, planning, orchestration, state management, and memory; Develop context engineering strategies balancing relevant information, model capabilities, latency, and cost; Make architectural decisions about when to use autonomous agents, explicit workflows, conventional algorithms, or combinations; Design tool interfaces and structured model interactions that support reliable, inspectable behavior; Develop understanding of complex document collections and data sources; Translate domain knowledge into retrieval systems, structured representations, and agent-accessible tools; Apply information retrieval, information extraction, and knowledge modeling techniques to heterogeneous data; Design strategies for handling temporal relevance, provenance, conflicting evidence, and incomplete information; Develop rigorous evaluations for AI-powered systems; Investigate system-level failures across retrieval, context construction, reasoning, tool execution, and outputs; Experiment with alternative architectures, models, and prompting strategies; Help establish engineering practices for measuring and improving reliability of agentic systems; Develop reliable services and asynchronous workflows with attention to concurrency, fault tolerance, observability, and maintainability; Integrate model inference, retrieval systems, and external data services into production applications; Build and operate containerized workloads and cloud infrastructure; Collaborate with engineers and domain experts to translate operational requirements into working systems

Requirements

Strong software engineering fundamentals: writes maintainable production code, reasons about system architecture, understands testing, debugging, and operational reliability; Substantive applied AI experience beyond basic model API integrations, with the ability to explain architecture, tradeoffs, limitations, and observed behavior; Information modeling instincts: can identify important entities and relationships in a new domain and design software abstractions that reflect how its information is used; Experimental discipline: tests assumptions, measures results, investigates failure modes, and uses evidence to guide technical decisions; Independent technical judgment: can evaluate alternative approaches, recognize unnecessary complexity, and make appropriate tradeoffs; Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders and domain experts; U.S. Person status (U.S. citizen, Green Card holder, lawful permanent resident, or individual granted asylum or refugee status) due to U.S. export control regulations; All work must be performed in the United States

Nice to have

Aviation, aerospace, or another technically complex, safety-critical domain experience; Computational linguistics, NLP, information science, or knowledge representation experience; Designing systems that reason over technical documentation, regulations, or heterogeneous operational data; Developing or operating distributed, event-driven, and containerized services; Building AI systems in which traceability, evidence, and human oversight are important; Experience with Python, LangGraph, BAML, AWS Bedrock, PostgreSQL/pgvector, and event-driven AWS infrastructure (helpful but not required)

Benefits

Healthcare: 100% of employee medical premiums covered (*), 25% coverage for dependents; Time Off: 3 weeks PTO plus 13+ paid company holidays; 401(k) offered (no current employer match, with a commitment to enhancing this benefit in the future)