AI Staff Engineer| Hybrid: Chicago, IL or NYC, NY

About the role

Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. This is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role. FDEs embed with the teams who run Circana's business — in operations, client service, and product — and turn what those teams know into working software: AI agents where judgment is needed, automations where a rule is enough, and the MCP servers and integrations that let both reach our systems. You will work in a small pod with a principal engineer and domain experts, build on Circana's agent platform and tooling, and own whether the result works in production. FDEs move between engagements: embedded builds with a business team, shared platform components, and client-facing solutions.

Responsibilities

• Embed with domain experts and the engineers who own the underlying systems. Learn how the work really happens, including the exceptions, and resolve ambiguity at the source.
• Decide, step by step, whether the work calls for a deterministic automation, an agent, or a person, and build whichever it is.
• Build agents end to end: tools, MCP servers, context and prompt design, plan construction, tool result shaping, and guardrails.
• Build integrations into real enterprise systems, including ones with thin documentation or no API: REST services, databases, file-based feeds, and schedulers.
• Build and maintain the evaluation sets, graders, and regression suites that measure whether a solution is right against ground truth; investigate failures down to the step that caused them.
• Debug from traces: reproduce, isolate, fix, and add the test that prevents recurrence.
• Automate the development loop itself: turn repeated manual work into commands, hooks, and subagents.
• Move decisions forward with working prototypes.

Requirements

• A track record of shipping production software that real users depended on, including AI or agentic systems.
• Strong integration engineering: APIs, data pipelines, databases, and systems you did not build.
• Deep practical craft with models: context management, prompting, structured outputs, and tool design.
• Strong Python; productive in an unfamiliar codebase quickly.
• Fluent daily use of agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.
• Comfortable working directly with non-technical experts, and persistent in getting to how a process actually works.
• Experience running workloads on a major cloud platform; ours can be learned quickly.
• Clear written communication under time pressure.
• Demonstrated self-direction: work you initiated, built, or fixed without being asked.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior forward deployed, solutions, or field engineering experience.
• Agentic systems in production, across multiple model families.
• Hands-on experience with an agent orchestration framework (Google ADK, LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Claude Agent SDK, or similar) on GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry, or a comparable AI stack.
• Working TypeScript and solid SQL.
• Front end capability: React, TypeScript, CopilotKit or similar.
• Workflow orchestration (Airflow or similar) and large transactional datasets.
• Evaluation and observability tooling; contributions to agent frameworks or MCP servers.

Tech stack & tools

Experience with any of the platforms and frameworks below is relevant; skills transfer readily between them.

• Platforms: GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry, on-prem
• Orchestration: Google ADK, LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Claude Agent SDK
• Models: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, open-weight families
• Protocols: MCP, A2A, OpenAPI, OAuth 2.0
• Engineering: Python, TypeScript, SQL, Claude Code
• Delivery: evaluation harnesses as CI, tracing and observability tooling, CI/CD integration

Circana behaviors

Beyond technical skills, experience, and role-specific attributes, these shared behaviors are fundamental to our culture and success. We seek individuals who consistently demonstrate and champion these behaviors in their daily work:

• Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.
• Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.
• Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.
• Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.
• Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.
• Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.
• Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.

Location

This position can be located in the following area(s): Chicago, IL (Hybrid) or NYC, NY (Hybrid)

Pay

The salary range for this role is $160,000 USD to $200,000 USD. This job is also eligible for bonus pay. An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs.

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.