Senior Agent Software Engineer at Cline

<h3>Who we are</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>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 &amp; provider agnostic. We support the best closed and open-weight models, giving users freedom, transparency with the best agent experience.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3>What we are looking for</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3>Responsibilities</h3> <ul> <li>Build core systems for agentic workflows: planning, tool use, context management, task execution, memory, feedback, and recovery.</li> <li>Design reliable infrastructure for agents to invoke tools, edit files, run commands, call APIs, and complete multi-step tasks.</li> <li>Improve agent quality through evals, benchmarks, traces, user feedback, and production debugging.</li> <li>Build model-agnostic systems for routing, inference, caching, streaming, and cost/performance optimization across closed and open-weight models.</li> <li>Partner with product, design, research, and open-source contributors to ship useful agent capabilities quickly.</li> <li>Own major technical initiatives from architecture through launch, monitoring, and iteration.</li> </ul> <h3>Qualifications</h3> <ul> <li>5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful tech lead, staff-level, or engineering management experience.</li> <li>Strong product engineering background, with experience building polished user-facing features across frontend and backend systems.</li> <li>Experience with TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, or similar production languages.</li> <li>Familiarity with LLM patterns: tool calling, context management, evals, retrieval, model routing, tracing, and cost/performance trade-offs.</li> <li>Direct experience using AI coding assistants and/or building agent systems.</li> <li>Able to rapidly prototype new agent use cases and turn the best ones into production-quality systems.</li> <li>Strong judgment about where agents are useful, where humans are better, and how to combine both.</li> </ul> <h3>Nice to have</h3> <ul> <li>Experience with open-weight models, local inference, model providers, or model routing systems.</li> <li>Experience building agents, SDKs, CLIs, developer tools, automation systems, or open-source infrastructure.</li> <li>Familiarity with sandboxed execution, MCP, language servers, AST tooling, Git internals, CI/CD.</li> <li>Open-source contributions or experience working with developer communities.</li> </ul> <h3>Compensation</h3> <p>Our cash compensation range for this role is $200,000 - $300,000, with meaningful equity.</p> <p>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.</p>