AI Agent Engineer
Engineers in this role design and deploy autonomous AI agents that solve real-world business problems across diverse industries, from finance and healthcare to infrastructure and marketing operations. They move fast across the full development lifecycle—from prototyping with frontier LLMs to shipping production systems that handle complex customer interactions, workflow automation, and operational decision-making at scale. What sets this work apart is the emphasis on reliability and observability: these engineers don't just build agents, they ensure they perform consistently in ambiguous, high-stakes environments while integrating with enterprise systems and human operators. Typically embedded in dedicated agent or agentic AI teams within product-focused AI companies, these roles sit at the intersection of platform engineering and direct impact, partnering closely with product managers, domain experts, and cross-functional stakeholders to turn loosely defined opportunities into robust, measurable business outcomes.
Measured across 110 of 110 open postings.
This role is advertised at 3 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 40%(44) | 4 | $294k |
| Senior | 25%(27) | 5 | $255k |
| Staff / Principal | 26%(29) | 8 | $300k |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 2 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“build novel full-stack agentic workflows that are production-grade, cybersecurity compliant, and have strong evaluations”
“Own and deliver end-to-end AI systems: agents and the platforms they depend on. You identify a user problem, break it down and build the AI system that solves it”
“Build agent-powered experiences that help businesses make informed growth decisions”
“Proficiency in native agentic coding, demonstrated through the daily use of tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and other agentic coding platforms”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Backend and API engineering
Full-stack product engineering
Distributed systems architecture
Monitoring and observability
Developer platform engineering
Systems performance optimization
ML systems development
Agent system architecture and development
AI evaluation design
Agent workflow design
LLM application development
Prompt and context engineering
Retrieval and ranking systems
AI safety and guardrails
AI-assisted development workflow
AI-native product design
Enterprise AI solution architecture
Customer-facing technical delivery
Mentoring and code review
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
110 open AI Agent Engineer jobs across 40 companies.
Other Engineering roles
General-purpose software engineering roles focused on building and maintaining software systems. Covers generalist SWE positions that don't clearly fall into frontend, backend, fullstack, or other specialized tracks.
Engineers focused on server-side systems, APIs, services, and data processing pipelines. Includes roles explicitly labeled as backend or server-side development.
Engineers specializing in user-facing interfaces, web applications, and client-side development. Includes UI/UX engineering and web development roles.
Engineers working across the entire application stack, handling both frontend and backend responsibilities.
Engineers building and maintaining internal platforms, cloud infrastructure, compute systems, and developer tooling.