[Hiring] Lead AI Engineer @Empirical

Role Description

We are building a development pipeline for one of our clients where business users initiate work, AI agents implement it, and engineers review outcomes rather than steer execution. You will lead that build and own the machinery that makes it safe enough to run: the conventions, gates, identities, autonomy tiers, and measurements that determine whether AI-generated code is safe to merge.

Most engineering roles are measured on what you ship. This one is measured on what the pipeline ships. If a good week is one where you personally closed a lot of tickets, this role will frustrate you. If a good week is one where forty changes went through cleanly and you spent Thursday deleting a rule that had stopped earning its place, keep reading. The hard part of this job is not building the automation; it is refusing to trust it.

What You’ll Do

• Own the knowledge plane: project conventions, reusable agent procedures, and source indexing so agents find every relevant call site, plus the enforcement that makes it all stick.
• Build gates that read artifacts: verification that inspects what actually happened rather than trusting an agent’s account of its own work.
• Design authority and identity: least-privilege, short-lived agent credentials with attribution from every commit back to a person, an agent, and a task.
• Calibrate autonomy tiers: a classifier that routes changes by how hard they are to undo and fails toward caution.
• Engineer containment: circuit breakers that stop a repair loop from amplifying its own failures.
• Own intake and measurement: the request surface with real reproduction context attached and a gate log that records every evaluation.
• Run the improvement ritual: dated incident records and a recurring pass that asks what each rule cost versus what it prevented.

Qualifications

• Based in Latin America, with enough timezone overlap for daily collaboration with a U.S.-based engineering team.
• 10+ years in software engineering, including deep CI/CD and platform experience.
• A genuinely strong engineer first: you cannot govern code you can’t read.
• Real security instincts without needing to be a security engineer.
• Testing judgment, not just testing habits.
• Hands-on agentic tooling experience.
• Comfortable operating cross-functionally.
• A willing writer: much of this job is prose.
• Excellent communication skills in English (written and spoken).

Requirements

• Your best weeks are the ones where you personally shipped the most.
• You want to “work on AI” in the sense of models and prompts.
• You would accept “the tests passed” as evidence that the tests ran.
• You need the thing you own to be finished.

The Engagement

• Full-time, dedicated client engagement with genuine ownership.
• Executive sponsorship: the client has committed to this as an operating model change.
• An honest scope: low-risk changes end to end, higher-risk changes gated.
• Leverage that compounds: a rule you write today is enforced against every change for as long as it earns its place.

Why Join Empirical

• Be part of a curated network of high-caliber, values-driven professionals.
• Do meaningful, strategic work on your terms.
• Stay in motion without burnout.
• Access Empirical’s community, engineering talent, and shared knowledge base.
• Work with clients who value clarity, velocity, and outcomes—not just hours.