Lead Software Engineer - Agent Safety

About Kraken

Kraken is a technology company driving global advancements in energy by innovating utility solutions and shaping the future energy system. Our mission is to improve the lives of one billion people within the next decade through smarter renewable energy generation, intelligent grid management, and empowering utilities with exceptional customer experiences.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to head our newly established Agent Safety/Evals team within AI Foundations. This key leadership role focuses on ensuring the security, reliability, and predictability of AI autonomous agents deployed across Kraken's internal workflows. You will craft the technical strategy for model evaluation, safety guardrails, and governance to enable safe AI adoption in internal tools without compromising quality or security.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of systems to secure, constrain, and oversee the operation of large language models and autonomous agents strictly within expected internal environments.
• Develop scalable and robust evaluation frameworks and harnesses to assess workflow-specific AI skills, focusing heavily on reproducibility and quality measurement.
• Implement comprehensive guardrails and governance procedures to manage AI behavior within internal platforms and tooling, covering both pre- and post-generation phases.
• Build AI-specific security and observability capabilities including authorization, monitoring pipelines, and incident response strategies to quickly detect and address anomalies.
• Lead continuous verification and red teaming initiatives targeting vulnerabilities, prompt injection attacks, and erratic agent behaviors within internal AI deployments.
• Operate and maintain high-throughput, low-latency safety services using AWS infrastructure, partnering with platform, operations, and security teams to balance architecture and cost considerations.

Required Qualifications

• Proven technical leadership experience setting direction for complex engineering projects or teams in ambiguous domains.
• Advanced software engineering expertise, particularly designing secure, reliable systems with thorough testing and deep understanding of concurrency and architecture tradeoffs. Python experience preferred.
• Strong knowledge of AI evaluation methodologies and safety considerations, capable of critically assessing and engineering reproducible evaluation harnesses for LLM outputs.
• Experience with threat modeling, authentication, red teaming, or implementing safety guardrails within internal platforms and tools.
• Proficiency in operating cloud services (AWS), ensuring scalable and reliable service delivery in collaboration with tech operations and security stakeholders.
• Excellent communication skills to translate complex safety metrics and evaluation results into actionable insights for diverse teams.

Success Indicators

• Confidence among engineers in deploying autonomous AI models securely within internal environments bounded by reliable safety guardrails.
• Established culture of rigorous, reproducible evaluation practices accurately reflecting real-world AI tool performance and safety.
• Robust AI security, monitoring, and incident response infrastructure to promptly manage any erratic internal agent behavior.
• Active technical leadership fostering collaboration across AI Foundations and mentorship for engineers influencing company-wide AI governance strategies.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with specialized LLM evaluation and safety tools such as Inspect AI, Ragas, OpenAI Evals, or NeMo Guardrails.
• Backend development expertise including Django and strong practices around security, performance, and maintainability.
• Familiarity with observability platforms like Datadog for tracing and monitoring in AI ecosystems.
• Experience with foundational AI engineering utilities like Pydantic AI, LiteLLM, or LangChain.

Additional Information

We strive to provide an inclusive work environment and welcome candidates from diverse backgrounds. If you require accommodations throughout the application process, please let us know so we can support you accordingly.

Kraken is an equal opportunity employer, committed to non-discriminatory hiring regardless of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, or any legally protected status.

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position, so applicants must have the right to work in the application country at the time of applying.

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