Software Engineer, Agent - Financial Services

Role details

ABOUT US At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We partner with industry leaders such as SoftBank, Uber, Rivian, CLEAR, and Sutter Health. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. ABOUT THE FINANCIAL SERVICES TEAM - Our financial services customers span systemically important banks, neobanks committed to building more delightful banking software (1 in 3 of the world's leading banks use Sierra!), insurers that provide protection for life’s most challenging moments, vertically integrated ecosystems like Rocket Companies, and more. The decisions we make impact millions of end customers and billions of dollars in economic activity. - Our financial services team partners closely with these organizations to set their AI strategies and build modern tools that carefully handle moments when a person’s private anxiety meets an institution’s procedural muscle - the instant before a family learns whether they are pre-approved for a mortgage; the claustrophobic half hour after someone notices a fraudulent charge; the frustrating experience of losing a card and needing to order a new one. - Sierra’s Financial Services team is transforming the customer experience and building technology that makes the industry more accessible, human, and affordable for everyone. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Design and deliver production-grade AI agents https://sierra.ai/blog/meet-the-ai-agent-engineer: You'll build and ship highly performant, reliable, and intuitive AI agents that are central, mission-critical and drive revenue directly to Sierra's growth. These aren't prototypes—they are powerful, scalable systems running in production environments across industries like finance, healthcare, and commerce. - Drive the Agent Development Life Cycle https://sierra.ai/blog/agent-development-life-cycle (ADLC): You'll have complete ownership and autonomy from initial pilot through deployment and continuous iteration. You'll be responsible for building, tuning, and evolving AI agents in production environments, defining the standard for ADLC best practices along the way. - Partner with large enterprises and cutting-edge startups: You’ll work directly with leaders at some of the world’s largest enterprises to understand their most pressing business challenges, and build AI agents that transform how they operate at scale. You'll also partner with the most cutting-edge startups in Silicon Valley, embedding AI agents across their entire business stack to drive innovation and efficiency. - Build the future of the platform: Your direct work with customers will guide the evolution of Sierra's core platform. You'll surface unmet needs, prototype new tools and features, and collaborate with research, product, and platform to shape the future of AI agent development and Sierra's product. EXAMPLE PROJECTS These are some examples of projects that engineers on our team have worked on recently: - Design and build AI agents for large telecommunications and media companies that consistently outperform human agents in managing subscription churn - Develop and refine AI agents capable of navigating complex customer interactions, like troubleshooting a broken device and personalizing product recommendations - Create generalizable AI agent frameworks tailored for industry-specific use cases. See some examples in our financial services blog https://sierra.ai/blog/five-ways-to-use-ai-agents-financial-services! - Facilitate design partnerships for new product initiatives, such as new agent architectures, self-service capabilities, and generative agent development - Experiment with the latest voice models and figure out how to integrate them at scale to enterprise-grade customers WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Experience building and scaling end-to-end production systems. - Strong technical problem-solving skills, especially in fast-changing, ambiguous environments. - A builder and tinkerer's mindset with high agency - you find creative ways to overcome obstacles and ship. - Comfort working directly with customers to understand their needs and solve real-world problems. - Excellent communication skills—clear, direct, and persuasive across technical and non-technical audiences. - Genuine interest in Financial Services and improving the end customer experience. Experience in financial technology, implementations at financial institutions, working inside of these institutions or familiarity with financial services security and compliance requirements (fair lending, PII handling, etc.) are a strong plus. EVEN BETTER... - Experience building or deploying AI/LLM systems in production - Have been a founder or founding engineer - you know what it means to balance craft, ownership, and speed - Familiarity with tools that power today's AI agents: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering - Prior experience with React, TypeScript, and/or Go - Previous roles where you interfaced with customers or led technical p