Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Tools
At a glance
Senior Engineering Leadership role at Cribl. Remote, United States · $210,000–$245,000 base.
remoteroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and operate agent workflows with orchestration, connected tools, shared context and ways for teams to extend them
- Translate goals into precise instructions, boundaries and checks that AI systems can follow consistently
- Equip agent systems with tracing, regression checks, human review, safe releases and operational safeguards
- Take ownership of runtime pieces such as job scheduling, isolation, execution environments and cloud operations
- Shorten engineering cycles with AI-assisted coding, testing and review, then help teams adopt the resulting tools
What you bring
- Staff-level software engineering background building and running distributed systems in production
- Strong TypeScript, modern JavaScript and Node.js experience delivering production services
- Practical experience applying LLMs and agent coding tools in production or substantial internal systems
- You have built agent orchestration, tool-calling, evaluation or guardrail capabilities tied to dependable backend services
- You are comfortable with automated delivery, gradual releases, production monitoring and rollback
Who this fits
This role suits a senior individual contributor who can carry projects from design through launch and ongoing operations, while helping engineering teams adopt the tools. The position is remote within the United States and may involve standby, on-call or off-hours work for systems you own.
From the employer
Join the company that’s building the telemetry infrastructure for the AI era. At Cribl, we partner with IT and Security teams at many of the world’s biggest enterprises, including half of the Fortune 100, to bridge the gap between AI ambition and infrastructure reality. As the AI Platform for Telemetry, we give customers the choice, control, and flexibility to manage and analyze telemetry for both humans and agents, so they can build what’s next.
We’re one of the fastest‑growing private companies and a leading player in a massive, fast‑moving market. With a global workforce, we’re remote‑first and grounded in a simple idea: software is a people business. Cribl is the place where curious, collaborative people can do their best work, grow fast, and bring their full selves to the herd.
Why You’ll Love This Role
You will help build Cribl Engineering’s AI platform and productivity rails: the shared systems, runtimes, and workflows that let engineers use autonomous AI across the software delivery lifecycle. Instead of one-off prompts or single-feature AI experiments, you will focus on intent engineering, orchestration and harnesses, and production agent infrastructure that other teams can trust and extend.
You will work with a small, high-impact team alongside tech leads, principals, and partner engineering groups. You will ship systems that plan, implement, review, test, and operate work with strong guardrails, then drive adoption until those tools become part of how Cribl builds software. You will also bring a builder mentality: use the product yourself to solve real team and Engineering problems, then turn that lived experience into better systems. Cribl strives to be a great place to work for everyone.
As An Active Member Of Our Team, You Will…
- Design, build, and operate production agentic workflows and the platform harnesses they run on (orchestration, tool integrations, shared context, extension points for other teams)
- Practice intent engineering: turn goals into clear specifications, rules, constraints, and acceptance criteria that AI systems can execute reliably
- Stay current on AI tooling and practices, and evangelize what works across Engineering so partners adopt proven patterns
- Engage hard in design discussions and healthy debate while the direction is open, then pivot with equal energy into implementation once the team decides
- Build observability and guardrails: tracing, regression detection, human-in-the-loop controls, safe rollout, and operability for agentic systems others depend on
- Own critical pieces of agent runtime: job isolation, scheduling, execution environments, secrets and access, and production operations in the cloud
- Design and operate event-driven architectures where it fits (queues, streams, webhooks, async job fan-out) so agentic systems stay scalable and loosely coupled
- Ship safely and often: keep agentic systems on automated CI/CD paths with progressive delivery and clear rollback
- Bring a builder mentality: dogfood what we ship. Use the platform to unblock yourself and the team, surface sharp edges, and turn real usage into product and platform improvements
- Compress software delivery loops by improving how AI helps engineers write, test, review, debug, and validate changes in real repositories and pipelines
- Partner across Engineering to understand workflows, ship tools that fit how people work, and drive adoption through playbooks, examples, demos, and enablement
- Evaluate build vs. buy; stay current on models, agent frameworks, MCP-style tool protocols, and the broader AI tooling ecosystem
- Define and track success metrics for adoption, quality, reliability, and satisfaction; use feedback and data to decide where to invest
- Partner on security and data access so tools are useful while respecting permissions and company policy
- Take designed projects from zero to production: own the path from agreed design through implementation, rollout, and day-two operability
- This position may include stand-by, on-call, or off-hours duties for systems you own
If You’ve Got It - We Want It
- Staff-level (or equivalent) professional software engineering experience building and operating production distributed systems
- Strong TypeScript (and modern JavaScript) plus Node.js experience shipping production services; polyglot comfort is welcome, TypeScript is the primary stack for this team
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to ship quickly: design, testing, debugging, APIs/services, and code quality
- You have lived (or thrived in) a continuous deployment culture: automated pipelines, progressive delivery or safe rollout, monitoring and rollback, and a bias toward frequent, reversible production changes rather than infrequent manual releases
- Hands-on fluency with modern LLM and agentic coding workflows in production or serious internal platforms (not curiosity-only)
- Experience building backend services, integrations, automation, and internal tools; comfort across product surfaces when needed
- Professional experience with agent orchestration, tool-calling systems, evaluation or guardrail techniques, and connecting agents to reliable backend systems
- Familiarity with agent frameworks, orchestration layers, and integrating external tools and data sources into LLM-based systems (MCP or equivalent experience is a plus)
- Experience with event-driven systems: queues, streams, pub/sub, webhooks, or similar async patterns in production
- Observability fluency: metrics, logs, traces, and using them to operate and improve production systems
- Clear communication, documentation, and teaching ability; comfort driving adoption, not only writing code
- Good judgment around security, permissions, data access, and safe tool rollout
- Ability to problem-solve from first principles, make sound trade-offs, and drive work independently through ambiguity
- Nice to have
- Hands-on Kubernetes in production
- Terraform or similar infrastructure-as-code for cloud provisioning
- Temporal or other workflow-platform experience
- Deeper AWS / cloud-native ops fluency (IAM, networking, running production workloads end to end)
The salary for this role is dependent on geographic location and will be based on the individual candidate's job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
In addition to base salary, for sales and some sales-adjacent roles, employees are eligible to earn incentive compensation (commission). For all other roles, employees are eligible to participate in the Cribl Corporate Bonus Program.
In addition to a competitive salary, Cribl also offers a generous benefits package which includes health, dental, vision, short-term disability, and life insurance, paid holidays and paid time off, a fertility treatment benefit, 401(k), and equity.
Bring Your Whole Self
Diversity drives innovation, enables better decisions to support our customers, and inspires change for the better. We’re building a culture where differences are valued and welcomed, and we work together to bring out the best in each other. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying.
Interested in joining the Cribl herd? Learn more about the smartest, funniest, most passionate goats you’ll ever meet at cribl.io/about-us.