Senior Agent Software Engineer
cline
San Francisco
Development
Job Score
80 pts
On-site model (+70)
Development (+10)
Role: Senior Agent Software Engineer
Who we are
Cline is building open-source AI agents for everyone. What started as the leading open-source AI coding agent has grown into a broader effort to make capable, transparent, and affordable agents available to developers and power users everywhere.
With 8M+ installs, and a community that grew 4,704% year over year, Cline is one of the fastest-growing open-source AI projects. We are model agnostic & provider agnostic. We support the best closed and open-weight models, giving users freedom, transparency with the best agent experience.
We are a talent dense group built by ex-senior execs from Snowflake, Hashicorp, Salesforce etc. Cline has raised $32M across Series A and Seed funding, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital.
What we are looking for
We're looking for an experienced engineer to help build the agent systems behind Cline: the runtime, orchestration, tools, evals, and product surfaces that let agents understand context, use tools safely, recover from failures, and complete complex tasks across real environments.
You should be excited by Cline's mission: building the best open agent platform, powering the largest number of users in the world, and making capable AI agents open, cheap, transparent, and model-agnostic. We want someone who believes users should be able to choose the best closed or open-weight models without being locked into a closed agent ecosystem + aim to provide the best agent experience for users.
This role is for someone who is both a strong builder and a skilled delegator. You know how to break ambiguous goals into concrete tasks, give feedback that improves output, and apply those instincts to managing AI agents. You are hands-on with agent workflows, opinionated about when to use agents and when to do the work yourself, and genuinely excited by agent-first engineering.
Responsibilities
- Build core systems for agentic workflows: planning, tool use, context management, task execution, memory, feedback, and recovery.
- Design reliable infrastructure for agents to invoke tools, edit files, run commands, call APIs, and complete multi-step tasks.
- Improve agent quality through evals, benchmarks, traces, user feedback, and production debugging.
- Build model-agnostic systems for routing, inference, caching, streaming, and cost/performance optimization across closed and open-weight models.
- Partner with product, design, research, and open-source contributors to ship useful agent capabilities quickly.
- Own major technical initiatives from architecture through launch, monitoring, and iteration.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful tech lead, staff-level, or engineering management experience.
- Strong product engineering background, with experience building polished user-facing features across frontend and backend systems.
- Experience with TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, or similar production languages.
- Familiarity with LLM patterns: tool calling, context management, evals, retrieval, model routing, tracing, and cost/performance trade-offs.
- Direct experience using AI coding assistants and/or building agent systems.
- Able to rapidly prototype new agent use cases and turn the best ones into production-quality systems.
- Strong judgment about where agents are useful, where humans are better, and how to combine both.
Nice to have
- Experience with open-weight models, local inference, model providers, or model routing systems.
- Experience building agents, SDKs, CLIs, developer tools, automation systems, or open-source infrastructure.
- Familiarity with sandboxed execution, MCP, language servers, AST tooling, Git internals, CI/CD.
- Open-source contributions or experience working with developer communities.
Compensation
Our cash compensation range for this role is $200,000 - $300,000, with meaningful equity.
Final offer amounts are determined by experience, expertise, leveling, and market conditions. Benefits include comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and your dependents, plus a 401(k) plan.
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