Open Source Engineer, Agents

Join us and help shape the future of AI by redefining document workflows with AI agents.

About The Role

We're seeking an Agent Engineer to join LlamaIndex, where you'll contribute to cutting-edge AI frameworks that empower developers worldwide to create Document Agents and RAG applications. Your work will directly impact thousands of developers and shape how the industry builds with LLMs and knowledge bases.

Our Values:

• Collaborative Innovation: We work in a high-trust environment where engineers own their ideas from conception to release. We expect autonomy and offer the same to peers—great ideas can come from anywhere.

• Community-Driven Excellence: Our success is measured by developer impact, from open-source developers building prototypes to enterprise customers running production AI systems. We iterate based on real-world feedback across the entire spectrum.

• Continuous Learning: We stay at the forefront of AI research and technology. The field moves fast, and so do we—experimentation and learning are part of the job.

• Radical Transparency: Open-source is more than code - it's a commitment to shared knowledge

The Role:

As an Agent Engineer at LlamaIndex, you'll wear two hats:

Open Source Innovation (60-70%)

Design and build core agent capabilities, retrieval algorithms, and document processing features that thousands of developers rely on daily. You'll push the boundaries of what's possible with LLM agents while maintaining the elegant, intuitive APIs LlamaIndex is known for.

Product Bridge (30-40%)

Work closely with our platform teams to translate open-source innovations into production-ready APIs and services via LlamaCloud. You'll ensure seamless developer experiences across both worlds, bringing learnings from open-source experimentation to productized features.

Key Responsibilities

Building Core Agent Tech:

• Develop and iterate rapidly on agentic reasoning systems, memory architectures, and retrieval pipelines that handle real-world document complexity

• Ability to reason about LLM behavior, retrieval quality, and system design from first principles. This means building focused, high-quality tools rather than general-purpose wrappers.

• Building with the community. This means helping to manage community interactions and feedback over Github and Discord.

Bridging Open Source & Product:

• Shape the evolution of LlamaCloud SDKs by bringing learnings from open-source experimentation to production APIs

• Collaborate with platform teams to ensure feature parity and smooth migration paths between OSS and managed services

• Translate community feedback and use cases into actionable product requirements

Technical Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering experience with production Python systems

• Expert-level Python: modern tooling (uv, ruff, mypy), Pydantic, FastAPI/Flask

• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications (production or personal projects), using both existing AI frameworks and from-scratch

• Solid understanding of RAG patterns, embeddings, vector databases, and semantic search. All with existing AI frameworks and from-scratch

• Active open-source contributor with strong technical writing skills

• First-principles thinking: you build precise, well-scoped tools and understand why abstractions exist, not just how to use them

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep knowledge of LLM architectures and internals (transformers, attention mechanisms, training/fine-tuning)

• Built production agent systems with multi-step reasoning, tool use, or planning

• Meaningful contributions to popular AI/ML open-source projects

• Experience with Docker/Kubernetes, distributed systems, or API design

• Active in AI research community (papers, blog posts, talks)

Location

Hybrid in San Francisco, CA preferred. Remote available.

What We Offer

• Be a member of an innovative AI infrastructure team

• Work on challenging, meaningful technical problems

• Significant creative and technical autonomy

• Opportunity to shape an open-source project with global impact

Why Join Us?

• Impactful Mission: Work on innovative AI products that redefine how knowledge is accessed and utilized.

• Collaborative Team: Join a team of passionate individuals committed to pushing the boundaries of technology.

• Growth Opportunities: Be at the forefront of the AI revolution, with ample opportunities to grow alongside our scaling organization.

Additional Benefits

• Competitive base salary and equity compensation

• Comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage for you and your family

• Unlimited paid time off policy

• Daily catered lunch and snacks in the San Francisco office

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

LlamaIndex does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, employees, or any other organization location. LlamaIndex is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.