Staff Software Engineer, Agent Orchestration

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Agent Orchestration team, you will design and build the systems that govern how Decagon agents operate in real-world environments. You will own complex, distributed systems that sit at the heart of the agent runtime: execution frameworks, model orchestration logic, and experimentation platforms that ensure agents are fast, reliable, and continuously improving. Your work will directly impact how agents reason, take actions, and deliver outcomes across millions of interactions.

This role operates in a fast-moving, ambiguous space with tight feedback loops. You’ll move fluidly between diagnosing production issues, designing new system abstractions, and running experiments to improve agent behavior. You’ll collaborate closely with Research, Infra, and Product teams to ship improvements safely and at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve agent harnesses that power different product experiences
• Build core runtime systems, including AOP execution and multi-model orchestration
• Develop control-plane logic for routing, planning, and tool invocation with strong safety guarantees
• Optimize agent systems for latency, reliability, and production correctness
• Analyze real-world failures and use data to drive iterative improvements
• Build and operate online experimentation (A/B testing) and contribute to offline evaluation frameworks
• Improve observability, testing, and simulation systems to ensure safe, measurable progress
• Contribute to voice and real-time systems (e.g., transcription pipelines, turn-taking, latency improvements)
• Continuously adapt orchestration systems as model capabilities evolve

Requirements

• Strong experience building distributed systems or backend platforms in production environments
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with rapid iteration cycles
• Experience owning systems end-to-end, from design through production and iteration
• Familiarity with experimentation, evaluation, or data-driven product improvement loops
• A track record of improving system reliability, performance, and observability
• Ability to debug complex systems and identify root causes of failures

Qualifications

• Excited about diagnosing failure modes and iterating toward measurable improvements
• Motivated by pushing the frontier of how intelligent systems behave in the real world
• Care deeply about production quality—not just making systems work, but making them reliable, safe, and scalable

Skills

• Experience with distributed systems and backend platforms
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Experience owning systems end-to-end
• Familiarity with experimentation, evaluation, or data-driven product improvement loops
• Track record of improving system reliability, performance, and observability
• Ability to debug complex systems and identify root causes of failures

Benefits

• Take what you need vacation policy
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
• Retail Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
• Parental Leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best