Frontier Agents Engineer (Applied AI)

Scale AI is the data foundation for AI, helping organizations build and deploy reliable production AI applications. We partner with the world's leading enterprises and government organizations to accelerate their AI transformation through frontier AI systems that solve real business problems.

Every day, we work with organizations across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, media and telecommunications to build production AI agents that automate complex workflows, help humans, reason over enterprise knowledge, and operate safely at scale.

The Opportunity

Applied AI is moving faster than ever. New foundation models, reasoning techniques, agent architectures, and research papers emerge every week. Yet building AI systems that reliably solve real-world problems remains one of the hardest engineering challenges.

As a Frontier Agent Engineer (Applied AI), you'll bridge the gap between cutting-edge AI research and production deployment. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to design, evaluate, and deploy intelligent systems that combine frontier models with structured knowledge, retrieval, traditional machine learning, and enterprise software.

Unlike traditional ML roles that focus on a single model or product, you'll work across a diverse portfolio of AI challenges spanning multiple industries and use cases. You may build a multi-agent research system and then participate in designing a customer intelligence platform, a healthcare copilot, or an autonomous workflow for a Fortune 100 company.

If you enjoy reading new AI papers, experimenting with the latest models, and shipping production systems that create measurable business impact, you'll fit right in.

What You'll Build

Frontier AI Systems

Experimentation & Evaluation

Production AI Engineering

Customer Innovation

What Makes This Role Different

• Design and deploy production AI agents that leverage the latest advances in large language models, reasoning, retrieval, memory, and tool use.
• Architect intelligent systems that combine LLMs, traditional machine learning, structured knowledge, enterprise data, and deterministic software into reliable production workflows.
• Engineer customer intelligence layers, retrieval pipelines, memory systems, and knowledge representations that allow agents to reason over large, heterogeneous enterprise data.
• Develop multi-agent systems that coordinate reasoning, planning, tool execution, and human oversight.
• Translate frontier AI research into production systems by rapidly evaluating new models, prompting techniques, reasoning paradigms, and agent architectures.

We believe the fastest way to grow as an Frontier Agents engineer is to solve many different AI problems, not the same problem repeatedly. You'll work across diverse industries, datasets, model architectures, and agentic systems, rapidly developing intuition for what makes AI systems successful in production.

Required Qualifications

• Designing reasoning and agent architectures
• Building retrieval, memory, and customer intelligence systems
• Developing predictive models that work alongside LLMs
• Running experiments and ablation studies

Applied AI

Software Engineering

Customer Engineering

Dual Fluency

While this role initially emphasizes Applied AI and machine learning, every Frontier Agent Engineer develops expertise across both Applied AI and Forward Deployed Engineering.

Over time, you'll gain hands-on experience integrating AI systems into enterprise environments, deploying production infrastructure, and working directly with customer engineering teams. Our goal is to develop engineers who can move seamlessly between cutting-edge AI research and real-world production systems. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is: $180,000—$225,000 USD

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.

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