← All roles

Member of Technical Staff - Agent Engineer

Phylo· Technical Staff
Apply on company site
South San Francisco$200k - $300kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

We’re looking for an engineer with research or production experience in AI agents to build and evaluate systems that make our agents capable, reliable, and measurably better. You will own agent harness systems in production, build evaluations, and bring latest advances into production to support scientific discovery.

Responsibilities

  • Advance the agent harness by bringing the latest research and open-source developments into production and experimenting with new approaches to multi-agent coordination, model routing, memory, planning, and tool use.
  • Build rigorous evaluations that measure agent quality, reliability, latency, and cost on representative scientific tasks.
  • Monitor agent quality in production, troubleshoot failures quickly in high-ambiguity situations, and translate findings into engineering improvements.
  • Collaborate on reliable infrastructure for long-running sessions, safe sandboxed execution, background work, and subagents.
  • Partner with scientists and engineers to evaluate and productionize new agent capabilities.

Qualifications

  • Strong software engineering experience building production backend systems, infrastructure, or distributed systems.
  • Research or production experience in machine learning, or another quantitative discipline.
  • Familiarity with LLM APIs, tool calling, agent runtimes, or workflow orchestration.
  • Strong quantitative judgment and the ability to determine whether an apparent improvement is real, reproducible, and meaningful.
  • Ability to move between research questions, data analysis, system design, and production implementation.
  • Experience or strong interest in AI for science, scientific agents, computational research, or automated scientific discovery.
  • Experience working in AI-native teams that use coding agents or automation extensively.
  • High ownership, clear communication, and strong engineering judgment.

Skills

Required:Backend engineering / distributed systemsMachine learning / quantitative methodsLLM APIs / tool calls / agent runtimesExperimental evaluation / experimentationCommunication / ownership

Benefits

  • Competitive salary and equity share in building the future of biomedical discovery
  • Full medical, dental, and vision coverage, including free therapy sessions and eyewear stipend
  • 401(k) to help you build long-term financial security (US only)
  • Unlimited PTO to recharge when you need it (US only)
  • Lunch and snacks when you're in the office
  • Regular team offsites and company events
  • A culture of excellence and speed - we move fast, think big, and support each other every step of the way
  • Your work will directly impact our mission to 100X biomedical discoveries through AI
Last updated Aug 20, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Phylo

The New Way Biologists Work.

The New Way Biologists Work. Collaborative agents designed for biologists to make more discoveries, faster, with rigor, and at scale.

biomedical researchAI scientistbiologistsdiscoverybiology
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Phylo