AI Engineer - Agents

Title: AI Engineer - Agents Location: San Francisco ABOUT US Campfire is on a mission to redefine the accounting software landscape by taking on giants like Netsuite to build modern accounting software for startups and mid-size tech companies. We graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2023 cohort, and we are backed by prominent investors like Foundation Capital and a rapidly growing customer base. 🌟 THE ROLE Join Campfire as a Staff AI Engineer to build production AI agents that help customers get real accounting work done. You’ll combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience developing and operating agentic applications, from automating financial workflows to helping customers understand and act on their financial data. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll shape our agent architecture, ship customer-facing features, and establish the engineering practices that make them reliable. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and design to turn ambiguous problems into software our customers can trust 💼 WE NEED SOMEONE WHO Has Expertise - Strong software engineering background, with substantial experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems. You write maintainable Python and bring sound judgment to APIs, data models, distributed systems, and testing. - Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered agents used by real customers, including tool calling, orchestration, retrieval, and integration with application data and workflows. - Experience owning agent quality in production through evaluations, tracing, monitoring, and systematic debugging of failures. - Practical judgment around agent permissions, data access, human approvals, and recovery from partial failures, especially when agents take actions on behalf of users. - Ability to balance accuracy, latency, cost, and complexity, and to choose when a problem calls for an agent, a deterministic workflow, or a combination of both. - A track record of staff-level impact: leading complex initiatives, making architectural decisions across teams, mentoring engineers, and raising engineering standards while staying close to the code: Thrives in Agility: - Our team is lean and moves quickly. You’re comfortable experimenting, iterating, and shipping fast. Values Autonomy: - You take ownership end-to-end — from prototyping models to deploying and monitoring them in production. 👥 IDEAL CANDIDATE - You’re an experienced engineer with 8+ years of software engineering experience who has owned consequential production systems and can explain the tradeoffs, failures, and lessons behind what you’ve shipped. - You’ve taken AI agents beyond demos and prototypes and improved them based on real usage. - You care about customer outcomes and bring curiosity about accounting and financial workflows. Prior fintech or accounting experience is a plus. - You collaborate closely with engineering, product, and design, communicate technical decisions clearly, and help other engineers grow. - You want the ownership and scope of a staff role while remaining an active builder. 📢 LET’S CONNECT Think you’re the perfect fit? We’re excited to meet you! Reach out, share your story, and let’s explore how you can bring intelligence to Campfire’s mission.