AI Engineer

SurroundSound builds and operates AI-powered local news outlets, using agents to research and draft stories for human producers to review and publish. The AI Engineer will build agent systems for local-news coverage, including context and retrieval, tool orchestration, durable state, provenance, and evaluations, while owning delivery and improving newsroom workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Design agent workflows: retain reporting context across runs and coordinate research, drafting, and review
• Evaluations: turn producer corrections and failure traces into evaluation cases and tested changes to prompts, retrieval, and tools
• Ship: handle duplicate work, interrupted runs and cost

Requirements:

• Experience shipping an LLM or agent application used by real users. Internal tools, small products, and startup work count
• Be ready to explain your contribution, how people used it, and what you improved after launch
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals: Python, SQL, APIs, and background jobs
• You can debug and maintain production software
• Practical experience with model/tool integration, structured outputs, retrieval, context and workflow state
• Sound judgment about AI output: checking evidence, recognizing unsupported claims and evaluating changes before release
• Clear communication, independent problem-solving, and effective use of AI coding tools
• You can explain, review, and validate the code you ship
• Media, publishing, or other products where information accuracy matters
• Search, entity resolution, document extraction, or long-running workflows
• AWS, FastAPI, Celery, PostgreSQL, or enough TypeScript/React to contribute to producer tools