Senior Software Engineer, AI Agent & LLM
At a glance
Senior AI Engineering role at otterai. Mountain View · $185,000–$230,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build agent features in AI Chat that let users explore conversations, find information and handle multi-step tasks
- Improve how the knowledge engine extracts, labels and indexes information from conversations
- Create evaluation data, automated scoring, regression checks and release safeguards for AI quality
- Trace production problems through models, prompts, retrieval, tools, data flows, backend systems and product behavior
- Develop shared agent services for orchestration, tracing, debugging, retries, sandboxed execution and observability
What you bring
- At least five years in AI-agent engineering, machine-learning engineering or a related area
- Strong backend or distributed-systems engineering skills, plus hands-on experience shipping agent or LLM products
- Experience assessing AI quality in systems whose outputs can vary, and using traces, logs, data and examples to diagnose failures
Who this fits
This hands-on senior role suits an engineer who can take unclear product needs through production and keep improving results. You'll work across AI, product, infrastructure, data, security and application teams. The stated annual salary range is $185,000 to $230,000.
From the employer
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Senior AI Agent & LLM Engineer who combines strong software engineering capabilities with a deep focus on AI quality. You will help build and improve the AI systems behind Otter’s conversational knowledge engine and AI Chat, spanning user-facing agent experiences, evaluation systems, and the shared platform required to operate them reliably at scale.
This is a hands-on role for someone who can move from an ambiguous product problem to a working production solution, define how quality should be measured, and drive improvements across services, models, and user experience.
Your Impact
- Build AI-agent experiences for Otter AI Chat that help users reason over conversations, retrieve knowledge, and complete complex tasks.
- Advance Otter’s conversational knowledge engine through better knowledge extraction, annotation, and indexing.
- Develop robust evaluation datasets, automated graders, regression tests, and release gates for AI quality.
- Diagnose failures across models, prompts, retrieval, tools, data pipelines, backend services, and product workflows.
- Build shared agent infrastructure for orchestration, tracing, debugging, retries, sandboxed execution, and observability.
- Improve task completion, correctness, groundedness, reliability, latency, and cost.
- Turn production traces, customer feedback, and usage signals into measurable product and model improvements.
- Collaborate across AI, product, infrastructure, data, security, and application teams to deliver end-to-end capabilities.
We're looking for someone who
- Has 5+ years of AI Agent engineering, machine learning engineering, or related experience.
- Brings strong backend or distributed-systems engineering skills.
- Has hands-on experience building and shipping AI-agent or LLM-powered products.
- Has a strong focus on AI quality and experience evaluating nondeterministic systems.
- Can use data, traces, logs, and qualitative examples to identify and resolve complex failures.
- Works effectively across services, technical domains, and organizational boundaries.
- Combines strong product judgment with rigorous engineering and evaluation practices.
- Operates with high agency, strong ownership, and a bias toward action.
- Can take ambiguous problems from initial exploration through production launch and continuous improvement.
- Demonstrated ability to use coding agents effectively while rigorously reviewing and controlling the quality of their output is a plus.
About Otter.ai
We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.
With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real-time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.
Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive and accessible workplace. We provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants throughout the hiring process.
Accessibility & AccommodationsOtter.ai is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our hiring process. If you need assistance or an accommodation during any stage of the recruitment process, please contact hr@otter.ai at least 3 business days before your interview.
*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.
Salary range
Salary Range: $185,000 to $230,000 USD per year
This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent based on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of our comprehensive total rewards package.