Agent engineer

AI Agent Engineer — open roles, skills, and who's hiring

There are 371 open agent engineer roles across 47 companies tracked by the Agentic Ready Jobs Index, as of 12 June 2026. That makes agent engineering the largest category in the index — 43% of all 866 agentic roles tracked — and 205 of those 371 postings carry "forward deployed" in the title. Only 32 of the 371 (9%) are remote, which is low for software engineering and tells you something about how hands-on this work still is.

Open roles1869
Companies178
Remote share8%

What an agent engineer is

An agent engineer builds software systems where a language model decides what to do next: which tool to call, what to ask the user, when to stop. The job sits one layer above model work and one layer below product work. You are not training models, and you are not only shipping features — you are designing the loop in which a model plans, acts, observes the result, and acts again, and making that loop reliable enough to put in front of customers.

In practice the work splits into a few recurring problems. Orchestration: sequencing model calls, tool calls, and human checkpoints, which is why titles like "Staff Software Engineer, Agent Orchestration" and "Software Engineer, Agent Harness" appear in the current postings. Tooling: giving the agent safe, well-described interfaces to real systems. Evaluation: building the test harnesses that tell you whether a change made the agent better or just different. And failure handling: agents fail in open-ended ways, so a large share of the job is bounding what a wrong action can cost.

The title is young and unsettled. The same work is posted as "Software Engineer, Agents", "Agent Engineer", "Frontier Agents Engineer", and — in over half the category — "Forward Deployed Engineer", where the agent-building happens inside a customer's environment. If you are searching for this job, search the work, not the title.

Skills and tools that appear in real postings

Language-wise this is ordinary production engineering: the postings are software engineering roles first, with Python and TypeScript the default assumption at most of the companies listed below.

How to break in

The most common path in the current data is sideways from production software engineering: 241 of the 371 postings (65%) are mid-level, so companies are hiring engineers who can learn the agent layer rather than demanding years of agent experience nobody has. A public project where an agent does real multi-step work — with an eval suite attached — covers what most interviews probe.

Adjacent roles worth comparing: AI engineer if you want to sit closer to the model, agent ops engineer if you prefer the infrastructure under the agents, forward deployed engineer if you want the customer-facing variant, and AI governance lead if the permission-boundary part of the job interests you more than the building part. The full dataset is on the Agentic AI Jobs Index and the tracker.

Skills appearing in real postings

Orchestration and runtimeVoice agentsEvalsSafety and governance hooksPythonTypeScript

Hiring for this role right now

Live from the Agentic AI Jobs Index, updated 16 June 2026.

Salary

None of the 371 agent engineering postings in the 12 June 2026 snapshot disclosed a salary range, and levels.fyi does not yet track "agent engineer" as a distinct title. The closest public benchmark is the ML/AI software engineer category on levels.fyi, with a median total compensation of $243,000 — self-reported and skewed toward large US tech companies, so treat it as a ceiling-ish reference, not a market rate.

Sources: levels.fyi — ML/AI software engineer

Common questions

Frequently asked questions

How many agent engineer jobs are open right now?

371 open agent engineering roles across 47 companies, as of 12 June 2026, per the Agentic Ready Jobs Index. That count excludes generic software roles at AI companies — a posting must be agent-specific to be included.

Do I need ML experience to become an agent engineer?

The current postings say no: 65% are mid-level software engineering roles, and the work is systems design around model APIs rather than model training. Evaluation experience matters more than ML theory.

Are agent engineer jobs remote?

Mostly not. 32 of 371 tracked roles (9%) are remote as of 12 June 2026 — the category skews heavily toward San Francisco and New York offices, and the forward-deployed half of it requires customer-site travel.

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