Staff Engineer, AI Productivity

About the role

We are looking for a Staff AI Productivity Engineer to accelerate how our engineering organization works with AI coding tools. This is a hands-on technical role focused on building infrastructure, tooling, and documentation that makes AI agents dramatically more effective across our codebase. You will own the end-to-end problem of agentic productivity, ensuring AI tools are deeply integrated into how our engineers design, build, and ship software. You will combine hands-on implementation with cross-team leadership to raise the bar for AI-assisted development across Hightouch. The role serves as a companion to our Developer Productivity function, with a distinct focus on the AI-assisted development experience rather than core CI/CD pipelines. An exceptional candidate could effectively wear both the Staff Engineer and Developer Productivity hats when needed to maximize impact.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Own the agentic development environment, ensuring AI agents can operate in independent cloud-based sandboxes, execute our full test suites, and inspect build results with visual feedback.
• Build MCP server integrations that connect AI agents to the systems required to build and debug software, including CircleCI, Slack, Datadog, GitHub, and other critical internal tools.
• Own the repo-wide agents.md file and collaborate with engineering teams to continuously improve agent guidance, skills, and documentation that push the bar on agent effectiveness.
• Expose our conventions, package structures, and internal patterns in ways that AI agents can understand and use effectively to reduce friction during development.
• Work directly with engineers to diagnose why agents are struggling and address root causes through better tooling access, documentation, and clearer context.
• Develop tooling that enables non-engineers to make simple visual updates to our application, expanding who can contribute to UI and workflow improvements.
• Serve as a "PM" for internal AI agents, consistently tracking state-of-the-art AI productivity practices and driving their adoption across Hightouch.
• Partner with the Developer Productivity team to align on standards, avoid duplication, and ensure the overall developer toolchain supports agentic workflows.
• Define and maintain the guardrails, templates, and best practices that allow AI agents to operate safely at scale within our systems and compliance requirements.
• Contribute to hiring and mentoring other engineers who are passionate about agentic tooling, helping grow this capability across the organization.
• Measure the impact of agentic tooling on engineering velocity and quality, iterating based on data and feedback from engineering teams.
• Represent the AI productivity roadmap in cross-functional discussions, ensuring alignment with product, design, and platform teams on future capabilities.

Requirements

• You are an experienced software engineer with strong software engineering fundamentals, able to quickly understand and navigate complex backend codebases.
• You possess deep hands-on experience with AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Devin, or similar tools in real-world scenarios.
• You have a track record of writing effective agent documentation, custom instructions, or context files that meaningfully improved agent output and reduced manual intervention.
• You have built developer tools or infrastructure that other engineers actively use and rely on in their daily work.
• You are comfortable working across the full stack, including CI/CD systems, cloud infrastructure, internal tooling, and application code.
• You have a history of ownership and impact in fast-paced, startup-like environments where autonomy and results matter.
• You communicate clearly and constructively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to align on priorities and solve problems.
• You are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and iterating based on feedback while maintaining quality and reliability.

Nice to have

• Experience building or contributing to MCP servers or similar agent-tooling integrations that expose system capabilities to AI agents.
• Background in developer productivity, platform engineering, or developer experience roles in previous positions.
• Experience with our core stack, including TypeScript/JavaScript monorepos, Go, and GraphQL, as used in our production systems.
• You have set up sandboxed or containerized development environments at scale and understand the security and networking implications.

Practical notes

• This role is fully remote and open to candidates located in North America.
• Compensation for this position is stated as $180,000 - $400,000 USD per year and is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy.
• We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options, with early exercise and a 10 year post-termination exercise window.
• Applicants must follow the application instructions at Curl jobapi.hightouch.com on port 13783 and complete all required steps.
• The interview process includes a recruiter screen, a system design screen, an AI skills interview, a hiring manager interview, and a system design interview.
• Hightouch participates in E-Verify. After you join the team, eligibility to work in the U.S. will be verified by submitting information from your Form I-9 to the Social Security Administration and, if needed, the Department of Homeland Security. This process occurs post-hire only and is not used to pre-screen applicants.