Staff Software Engineer (AI Agents)

Traba
New York +2 more

In the 12 months to 30 Jun 2026, Traba filed 3 H-1B positions titled "Senior Software Engineer". Source: U.S. Department of Labor, LCA disclosure data. A record of filings already made, not a commitment to sponsor.

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior software engineers with AI-agent experience who can lead 0-to-1 builds and work closely with customers.

Best fit for

  • Senior software engineers with hands-on experience in LLM or agent-based systems and a track record in production deployments.
    — “7+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years of hands-on production work on LLM- or agent-based systems.”
  • Candidates who have led end-to-end platform development and are comfortable with high-agency, early-stage environments.
    — “A history of leading 0-to-1 builds in early-stage environments—comfortable with ambiguity and high-agency by default.”
  • Individuals with a background in vertical AI, AI-agent companies, or forward-deployed engineering roles.
    — “Background that maps to at least one of: vertical AI / AI-agent company, a forward-deployed engineering role, or an AI-native data company.”

Things to consider

  • This role demands significant on-site presence with customers and operators in the industrial supply chain domain.
    — “Spend real time in the field with customers and operators—translating what you see into durable product and repeatable deployment patterns.”
  • Candidates must be prepared to ship foundational technical decisions, not just contribute to them.
    — “Own the foundational technical decisions: model strategy, harness design, retrieval and memory architecture, tool/MCP surface, and how we measure quality.”

How to stand out

  • Highlight your experience in designing and deploying production agent systems with full ownership of evaluation and observability.
    — “Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production agent system: orchestration, tool use, retrieval, evals, observability, and cost/latency tuning.”
  • Emphasize your ability to work in customer-facing environments and translate operational insights into technical design.
    — “You're as comfortable in a warehouse on a customer site as in a design doc—you learn an industry's actual operations (WMS quirks, shift cadence, exception handling) and let that shape architecture.”
  • Showcase your experience in building canonical examples and setting technical standards in early-stage environments.
    — “Set direction by shipping. You raise the bar by writing the canonical example, not just the doc.”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • Architecting Traba's agent platform end-to-end
  • Building evaluation as a real engineering discipline
Typical background
Experience in building agent systemsStrong technical background

Skills & requirements

Required

AI Agent DevelopmentOrchestration RuntimeEvaluation StackIntegration LayerModel Strategy

Preferred

Customer ImmersionData Product Craft

About the role

Original posting from Traba via Ashby

Traba is building the AI operating system for the industrial supply chain - the network of warehouses, manufacturers, logistics providers, and workers behind the physical goods people rely on every day.

We started by tackling labor, supplying industrial businesses with consistent, reliable temporary workforces, and quickly became the fastest growing staffing company in America.

Since then, we've expanded our suite of AI agents to help logistics providers, manufacturers, 3PLs, and other industrial businesses fully automate their manual workflows, derive insights from their data streams, and transform their decision intelligence.

Our mission is to build a world where the global supply chain operates at peak efficiency.

We’re proud to be backed by some of the world’s best investors, including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst.

You'll build the AI agents themselves—the harnesses, evals, orchestration, and model strategy the rest of Traba's product runs on. We're seeking an entrepreneurial Staff Software Engineer (AI Agents) to join as a founding member of the Agents team and lead the development of Traba's agentic platform—the layer that synthesizes the data flowing through our marketplace, talks to our customers' operational systems, and acts autonomously inside the workflows that run their facilities. (Our Applied AI team puts these agents to work across the product; you own the agents, evals, and model strategy they depend on.) You'll partner with our CTO to make the core architectural calls on how agents are built, evaluated, and deployed at Traba; set the bar for quality and reliability; and bring the outside perspective on agent-building, FDE-style customer immersion, and data-product craft that this 0-to-1 product needs.

ABOUT YOU

  • You've built agents that survived contact with reality. You've shipped agent systems into production at scale—designed the harness, picked the orchestration patterns, owned the evals, and lived with the on-call—and you have strong opinions on where to draw the line between prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, and code.
  • Domain depth meets technical breadth. You're as comfortable in a warehouse on a customer site as in a design doc—you learn an industry's actual operations (WMS quirks, shift cadence, exception handling) and let that shape architecture.
  • Set direction by shipping. You raise the bar by writing the canonical example, not just the doc—picking the foundational tools, integrating the right model providers, designing the eval infrastructure, and bringing others along.
  • Sweat the small stuff at staff scale. You have strong opinions on eval datasets, prompt versioning, observability for agents, and the line between a clean abstraction and an over-engineered one.

YOU WILL

  • Architect Traba's agent platform end-to-end—orchestration runtime, eval and observability stack, the integration layer to internal and customer systems (WMS/TMS/ERP), and the patterns every agent is built on.
  • Own the foundational technical decisions: model strategy, harness design, retrieval and memory architecture, tool/MCP surface, and how we measure quality.
  • Spend real time in the field with customers and operators—translating what you see into durable product and repeatable deployment patterns.
  • Build evaluation as a real engineering discipline—datasets, graders, regression suites, and experimentation tooling.
  • Hire and mentor the engineers who build alongside you, and set the standard for what “good” looks like.
  • Partner with the CTO, product, and ops leadership on the multi-year platform roadmap.

YOU HAVE

  • 7+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years of hands-on production work on LLM- or agent-based systems.
  • Deep in Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js, with a track record designing distributed systems, APIs, and data models on PostgreSQL and modern messaging (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent).
  • Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial production agent system: orchestration, tool use, retrieval, evals, observability, and cost/latency tuning.
  • Background that maps to at least one of: vertical AI / AI-agent company, a forward-deployed engineering role, or an AI-native data company. Bonus for supply chain, logistics, or industrial exposure.
  • A history of leading 0-to-1 builds in early-stage environments—comfortable with ambiguity and high-agency by default.
  • Strong written and verbal communication—you can run a customer workshop, write the design doc, and recruit your future teammates.

BENEFITS

  • 📈 Start-up equity
  • 💰 Competitive Salary
  • 🩺 100% Paid health, dental & vision coverage
  • 🍽️ Dinner Provided via DoorDash, free DashPass & stocked kitchen for NY employees
  • 🚍 Commuter benefit
  • 🏋🏽 Gympass Benefit
  • ✚✚ Additional: One Medical Membership, Gympass, HSA via Optum, Talkspace, HealthAdvocate, Teledoc Health

SALARY RANGE DETAILS

The compensation range for this position is set between $240,000 and $300,000, reflecting our market analysis and other relevant considerations. However, exceptions may be made for candidates with qualifications that significantly differ from those outlined in the job description.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Traba is dedicated to promoting Equal Opportunity employment practices. We evaluate all applicants without discrimination based on race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other characteristics that are legally protected by local, state, or federal regulations. We encourage applicants from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets.

OUR VALUES

Dream Big - We are on a path to change the world for the better. We create and communicate a bold direction that inspires a life-changing vision. We don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.

Olympian’s Work Ethic - Changing the world never comes easy. We work harder, longer, and smarter, not just two out of three. We put everything we have on the field.

Growth Mindset - We confront the toughest challenges head-on and persevere. Sometimes we fail, but we brush ourselves off, adapt, learn, and push forward with resilience.

Customer Obsession - We go the extra mile for our workers and businesses. We remain focused on delivering high-quality products and services that solve this massive and overlooked industries’ problems

Job Applicant Privacy Notice https://traba.work/privacy-notice-applicants

Source: Traba careers (Ashby)

Similar roles

More roles at Traba