Senior AI Engineer
At a glance
Senior AI Engineering role at Workstream. Lehi · no salary stated · we estimate $161,745–$225,300 across the United States.
Workstream has not published a salary for this role. The figure below is our estimate, not theirs.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and operate live AI agents, covering orchestration, tool use, customer data links, permissions, and controlled logic
- Map design customers’ actual workflows and develop against their live information
- Create evaluation sets from customer work, with launch gates, regression checks, and ongoing monitoring
- Build reviewer queues, escalation routes, and decision traces, then test agents alongside the current process before launch
- Resolve live incidents and turn bespoke solutions into reusable agents, integrations, and playbooks
What you bring
- You have taken an AI agent or agentic workflow into production and run it yourself
- You can explain its failures, evaluation approach, and which decisions stayed fixed or required human judgment
- You have supported customers or end users through discovery, implementation, or incident response, and explain technical matters clearly
- You can break complex workflows into testable steps, agent choices, human review, and exception paths
Who this fits
This is a senior founding-engineer role for someone who can build from an early-stage idea and work with customers in their live workflows. You’ll help set engineering standards as the team grows and handle production issues. Pricing, deal acceptance, and margin decisions sit with other leaders.
From the employer
Workstream is a mission-driven company building the all-in-one HR, payroll, and hiring platform for managing the hourly workforce. There are 2.7 billion hourly workers, making up 80% of the global workforce, but this market has been heavily underserved by technology and deserves better. Workstream has been purpose-built for the hourly workforce from day one so that these businesses and their employees can thrive.
Our customers include leading brands from multiple sectors, including Burger King, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, IHOP, KFC, and Culvers. We are a high growth series B company and quickly expanding our product portfolio to deliver on our vision. We are backed by legendary VCs and industry experts like Founders Fund, BOND, and Coatue.
Day In The Life
Workstream is building AI-native services that deliver completed business outcomes—mature service categories businesses already pay for, delivered by AI agents plus a small human review layer at materially better margins than the traditional alternative. We are validating the first service now with design customers from our existing base.
This is a founding engineer opportunity. As the first engineer on Workstream's AI-Native Services (AINS) team, you'll spearhead a new company initiative from zero to one. You'll shape its architecture, set its engineering bar, and help build the team that follows. This is a Senior level role with a direct line to leadership and real influence over how AINS grows. You will not own pricing, deal acceptance, or the margin model—those sit with the Head of Delivery and the Head of GTM. You will own the components: whether they work, how they fail, and how fast bespoke work becomes reusable.
- Build and operate production agents and agentic workflows: orchestration, tool use, data connections, deterministic logic, state, and permissions.
- Work forward-deployed with design customers—sit in their workflow, map the messy reality, and build against live data.
- Build the evaluation harness: eval datasets from real customer work, pre-launch thresholds, regression suites, and post-launch monitoring.
- Build the human-review layer: exception queues, review tooling, escalation paths, and the tracing that makes every agent decision auditable.
- Run shadow-mode parallel runs against the customer's existing process or provider and drive discrepancies to zero before go-live.
- Turn customer-specific work into reusable agents, integrations, and playbooks—productization is the default, customization the exception.
- Handle production incidents end to end, and feed every failure back into evals and controls so it cannot recur.
- Help set the technical bar as the team grows.
Who You Are
- You have personally built and operated at least one AI agent or agentic workflow in production. You can clearly explain how it worked, where it failed, how you evaluated it, and what you kept deterministic or human-led.
- Strong engineering judgment across models, orchestration, APIs, data and integrations, permissions, observability, and evaluations.
- You have worked directly with customers or end users—discovery, implementation, or incident resolution—and communicate clearly with non-technical people.
- You can break a messy workflow into deterministic steps, agentic decisions, human judgment, and exception paths—and define how each part will be tested.
- You care about keeping plausible but wrong AI output away from customers: grounded context, constrained actions, verification, evals, review, monitoring.
- You thrive in zero-to-one ambiguity: shipping weekly, owning outcomes, and doing whatever the service needs—including unglamorous review tooling and data plumbing.
- Exposure to a regulated domain (payroll, payments, tax, benefits, labor compliance) is a plus, not a requirement.
- Demonstrated production experience matters more than title or years.
What We Offer
- A mission-driven and value-based company dedicated to empower deskless workers and local businesses
- An early employee opportunity at a Series B hyper-growth startup; work with the founding team and industry veterans to accelerate your career
- Competitive salary and equity
- Comprehensive health coverage: Medical, dental, and vision plans, with 100% employer-paid employee-only coverage available on select plans. Dependent coverage options vary by health plan.
- In office amenities and stocked kitchen
- 401K Plan
- Flexible PTO
Know More About Workstream
- https://www.workstream.us/blog/funding-series-b
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/26/workstreams-text-based-recruitment-tool-gets-a-48m-bet-from-bond-and-beyond/
- https://techbuzz.news/buzzworthy-august-27-2021/
Additional Information
Workstream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
We are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.