Software Engineer, AI Agent & LLM
Otter.ai is hiring a Software Engineer, AI Agent & LLM in Mountain View, United States. It pays $155k-$185k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Otter.ai.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions LLM, AI agents and python among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- Otter.ai has 19 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Build and improve conversational AI agents, LLM systems, and quality evaluation infrastructure at Otter.ai.
The Opportunity
We are looking for an 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 3+ 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: $155,000 to $185,000 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.
#LI-Hybrid
How we rate this
Software Engineer, AI Agent & LLM at Otter.ai rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ 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
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $155k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 8% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Tell me about a project where python was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where evaluation was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Python, Distributed Systems, Machine learning, and Evaluation. 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.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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