AI Architect & Autonomous Agent Engineer

AI Architect & Autonomous Agent Engineer (Full-Time, US-Based) Own a Live Production Agent Fleet WHAT THIS IS I run a small, profitable company with an unusual amount of automation behind it. A fleet of autonomous AI agents runs our internal data operation unattended for roughly 12 hours a day, every day. It is real production infrastructure that the business depends on. This is not a "build me a chatbot" job and it is not greenfield. The system exists, it runs daily, and mistakes cost real money. Multiple independent pipelines run in parallel, each doing multi-stage automated research, each calling paid third-party APIs at several points, each with its own quality gates and delivery step. Tens of thousands of records have moved through it. I have been operating and extending this system myself. I need someone to own it so I can stop being the bottleneck. This is an architect role and a builder role at the same time. You will design the system AND write the code AND debug it at 6pm when an agent has done something confident and wrong. There is no team under you to hand it off to. If that split appeals to you, keep reading. I will describe the domain and the specifics on a call, under NDA. What I can tell you publicly is the engineering problem, which is below and is genuinely the interesting part. WHAT YOU WOULD OWN 1. ARCHITECTURE AND AGENT DESIGN - Own the overall design: how the pipelines fit together, where state lives, what runs where, and what happens when any piece fails - Build and maintain autonomous agents that run for hours without a human watching, using Claude Code and Codex - Design the guardrails: quality gates, fail-closed checks, regression tests,and audit trails so an agent cannot silently ship bad work - Debug agents that did the wrong thing confidently, which is the hard part 2. MULTI-DEVICE FLEET ORCHESTRATION - Scale from one machine to many machines running the same pipelines at once - Solve the coordination problems that come with that: shared claim and lock systems so two machines never do the same paid work twice, distributed state, race conditions, safe failure modes - Build the setup and sync tooling so a new machine can be onboarded quickly and every machine runs identical, current logic 3. INTEGRATIONS AND DATA PLUMBING - Cloud spreadsheets and file storage used as coordination and reporting layers across machines - Several third-party vendor APIs, some of them metered and billed per call - Reporting that a non-engineer can actually read and trust 4. QUALITY AND COST CONTROL - Every paid API call should be justified and never duplicated - Build measurement into the system so we know our unit cost and can improve it deliberately, not by guessing WHO THIS IS FOR You will do well here if: - You have shipped agentic systems that run unattended, not just prompts that work in a demo - You think like a systems engineer: idempotency, locking, retries, race conditions, failing closed, and knowing the difference between "it returned 200" and "it actually worked" - You are comfortable in Python, APIs, and the command line - You test your own work adversarially and assume your first answer is wrong - You can explain a technical tradeoff to me in plain language without making me feel stupid or hiding the risk - You are comfortable working on something you cannot put in a public portfolio You will not do well here if you need tickets written for you, if you have only worked on greenfield projects, if you want to architect without implementing, or if you are more excited about model choice than about whether the pipeline is correct at 2am with nobody watching. LOGISTICS - Full-time, long-term. This is an ownership role, not a one-off project. - US-based required. Significant overlap with US Eastern hours. - NDA before we get into specifics. HOW TO APPLY Skip the generic cover letter. I will read all of these and ignore anything that looks templated. Please answer these three questions: 1. Describe an autonomous system you built that ran without supervision. What broke, how did you find out, and what did you change so it could not happen again? 2. Two machines are running the same pipeline against a shared queue of work items. Each item costs money to process. How do you make sure no item is ever paid for twice, and what happens when one machine dies mid-task? 3. What is a mistake an AI agent made in something you built that you did not catch until it had already caused damage? Short and specific beats long and polished. If your answer to #2 is one paragraph and correct, you are ahead of most applicants.