Software Engineer, Agent - Retail
Sierra· startup· Customer Experience AI· Sep 23, 2026 · 1mo ago
San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / Atlanta, GA / Toronto
In office
Full-time
Principal
$177K–$239K est.
Job description
ABOUT US
Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. 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 a commitment to balancing Family along the way. 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 linkedin.com and Clay Bavor linkedin.com. 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 RETAIL TEAM
- The Retail team on Agent Engineering supports some of the largest and most storied consumer brands in the world – including Gap, Wayfair, Sonos, and ADT. Together, we’re reinventing what commerce looks like in this new, AI-first era. Our customers rely on us to not only deliver novel experiences, but also host hundreds of millions of shopper and vendor interactions across web, app, phone, and in-store channels every year.
- Our team supports our customers’ customers in the moments that matter – whether that's guiding a shopper to the right product during a limited drop or a Black Friday surge, locating a package that never arrived, or troubleshooting an appliance that stopped working. Always true to each brand’s voice, we create seamless experiences that resolve issues, drive revenue, increase lifetime value, and build lasting loyalty.
- Our team supports our customers' customers in the moments that matter most, from product discovery and checkout to order tracking and troubleshooting. Always true to each brand’s voice, we create seamless experiences that resolve issues, drive revenue, increase lifetime value, and build lasting loyalty.
- Every engineer on the Retail Team is a product-led thinker; every PM on Retail is also tinkering and developing tangible prototypes; and every strategist on Retail is capable of owning an agent end to end. As a part of this team, you'll set the standard on what it means to go beyond your role, and help build the groundwork for the retail industry in the future.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Design and deliver production-grade AI agents sierra.ai: 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 sierra.ai (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:
- Abstracting complex commerce systems into packages: Modernize the sprawl of order management, fulfillment, returns, and warranty systems behind the large retailer ecosystem by creating scalable packages that optimize looking up and updating orders for customers – from Shopify storefronts to decades-old homegrown Order Management System (OMS) and claims platforms.
- Shipping the full discovery-to-checkout lifecycle: Build personalized shopping flows that carry a shopper from a vague idea to a completed order. This includes everything from building a recommendation engine that combines transcript-aware planning, structured filters, and semantic and keyword search to payment and order placement.
- Building production-grade agents at a truly global scale: Sierra’s retail agents serve some of the world’s largest global brands, handling traffic at unprecedented volumes during the busiest times of the year and across all geographic locales. You will be building at the frontier of enterprise applied AI.
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.
- Excitement in the retail space and a care for helping some of the world’s top brands continue to build brand loyalty with their customers.
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 projects with external stakeholders
OUR VALUES
- Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.
- Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.
- Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.
- Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.
- Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.
WHAT WE OFFER
We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:
- Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
- Life insurance and disability benefits
- Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
- Parental leave
- Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
- Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized
- Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most
- Free alphorn lessons
These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.
BE YOU, WITH US
We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
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Benefits
Benefits detected in the listing.
Dental
Vision
Paid Time Off
Parental Leave