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Campfire is building modern accounting software for startups and mid-size tech companies, competing with legacy players like NetSuite. The company graduated from Y Combinator Summer 2023 and is backed by Foundation Capital.
You will join as a Staff AI Engineer to design and ship production AI agents that help customers accomplish real accounting work. This is a hands-on technical leadership role combining strong software engineering with agentic application development. You'll shape agent architecture, deliver customer-facing features, and establish engineering practices that make agents reliable and trustworthy.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and building production backend systems with sound judgment around APIs, data models, distributed systems, and testing
- Shipping LLM-powered agents used by real customers, including tool calling, orchestration, retrieval, and integration with application data and workflows
- Owning agent quality in production through evaluations, tracing, monitoring, and systematic debugging of failures
- Making practical decisions around agent permissions, data access, human approvals, and recovery from partial failures
- Balancing accuracy, latency, cost, and complexity; choosing when a problem calls for an agent, deterministic workflow, or hybrid approach
- Leading complex initiatives, making architectural decisions across teams, mentoring engineers, and raising engineering standards while staying close to the code
- Working closely with engineering, product, and design to turn ambiguous problems into trustworthy software
The team is lean and moves quickly. You'll have end-to-end ownership from prototyping to production deployment and monitoring.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- Substantial experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems
- Strong Python skills with sound judgment on system design
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered agents used by real customers (tool calling, orchestration, retrieval, application integration)
- Demonstrated ability to own agent quality in production (evaluations, tracing, monitoring, debugging)
- Practical judgment around agent permissions, data access, human approvals, and failure recovery
- Track record of staff-level impact: leading complex initiatives, making architectural decisions, mentoring, raising standards
- Experience moving AI agents beyond demos and prototypes, improving them based on real usage
- Strong collaboration and communication skills
- Preferred: fintech or accounting domain experience
