Level

Decagon

Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform

Decagon is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform in San Francisco, United States. It pays $200k-$400k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Decagon.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • The listed pay starts 19% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include AI agents.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 133 other open roles at Decagon.

AI in this role

ai-agents

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences.

Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel.

We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others.

We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team.

About the Team

The AI Platform team builds the foundational systems that enable every engineer at Decagon to build with AI.

Our users are both engineers and coding agents. We build the execution environments, agent harnesses, evaluation systems, developer tools, and shared abstractions they use to plan, write, test, review, and ship production software.

We sit within Infrastructure and work closely with product, ML, data, and security teams. Our goal is to turn rapidly evolving agent capabilities into reliable, secure platforms that materially change how software gets built at Decagon.

About the Role

We’re looking for an experienced software engineer to help build Decagon’s AI-native developer platform.

You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, developer tooling, and applied AI. You will experiment with new agentic workflows, identify where they create real leverage, and turn the best ideas into dependable systems used across the engineering organization.

This is a highly product-oriented platform role. You’ll work directly with engineers to understand how they build software, find high-value opportunities for automation, and own solutions from architecture and implementation through rollout, adoption, and production operation.

A few areas you may work on:

  • Agent execution: Build harnesses, orchestration systems, and isolated environments where coding agents can safely execute long-running tasks.

  • Tools and context: Give agents secure, observable access to codebases, tests, documentation, internal systems, and the tools needed to complete real engineering work.

  • Agentic development workflows: Apply AI across planning, technical design, implementation, testing, code review, and production operations.

  • Evaluation and validation: Build systems that test and review human- and agent-generated changes, catch regressions earlier, and improve confidence in autonomous development.

  • Agent-native developer infrastructure: Design CI/CD, local development, APIs, CLIs, and platform tooling that can be operated directly by both engineers and agents.

  • Internal builder platforms: Create reusable frameworks that let teams quickly build their own internal tools, dashboards, automations, and agents.

What you'll do

  • Design, build, and operate the core platform behind agent-driven software development at Decagon.

  • Lead ambitious platform projects from an ambiguous problem through technical design, implementation, rollout, and long-term evolution.

  • Turn successful experiments into secure, reusable abstractions that engineering teams can adopt without becoming experts in the underlying infrastructure.

  • Partner closely with engineers across the company to understand bottlenecks, prototype solutions, and drive adoption.

  • Improve the speed and quality of software development through better agent tooling, testing, review, and automation.

  • Own the reliability, observability, security, performance, and cost of the systems you build.

  • Help define how Decagon engineers—and increasingly autonomous agents—build and operate production software.


You might be a great fit if you

  • Have 4+ years of experience building production software, particularly in backend, infrastructure, platform, or developer tooling.

  • Are a strong programmer in Python, TypeScript, or another systems-oriented language.

  • Have designed and operated APIs, services, or platforms that other engineers depend on.

  • Understand distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, containers, and production reliability.

  • Have taken technically complex projects from ambiguous problem statements to widely adopted production systems.

  • Care deeply about developer experience and know how to turn complicated infrastructure into simple, useful abstractions.

  • Move quickly while maintaining a high bar for correctness, security, and operational quality.

  • Communicate clearly and enjoy working directly with the engineers who use what you build.

Even better if you have

  • Experience building coding agents, tool-use systems, agent harnesses, or sandboxed execution environments.

  • Experience with CI/CD systems, build infrastructure, monorepos, or large-scale test automation.

  • Built evaluation, testing, or review systems for AI-generated code.

  • Experience with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, secrets management, or identity and access systems.

  • Built an internal developer platform or shared tooling that achieved meaningful adoption across an engineering organization.

  • Applied AI to materially improve engineering velocity, reliability, or software quality.

Compensation

$200K – $400K + Offers Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:

  • Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family

  • Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

  • Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)

  • Parental Leave

  • Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

  • Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance

  • Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best

  • Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)

These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.

How we rate this

Senior Software Engineer, AI Platform at Decagon rates 72 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI agents

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$200k
Typical software engineer job
$168k

This posting starts 19% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
  2. Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
  3. If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

Want an expert to read your CV for this job?

Free. Send your CV and the role you want next. We reply by email within 2 to 4 business days.

Get new software engineer jobs (Works on AI ●●●○ or higher) by email

One email a week with the new software engineer jobs (Works on AI ●●●○ or higher), each rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.

Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.

Similar roles

Software Engineering roles that work on AI, at other companies.

What kind of AI work fits you?

Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.

Find my next step

More jobs at Decagon

More software engineer jobs

Related searches

Same AI level

Jobs by city