AI Staff Engineer| Hybrid or NYC, NY

Position: AI Staff Engineer| Hybrid  or NYC, NY
Let’s be unstoppable together!

Circana is a leading provider of technology, AI, and data solutions for consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, and retailers. Our predictive analytics and Liquid Data® platform help clients measure market share, uncover consumer behavior, and drive growth—powered by six decades of expertise and an expansive, high-quality data set.

At Circana, we are fueled by our passion for continuous learning and growth, we seek and share feedback freely, and we celebrate victories both big and small in an environment that is flexible and accommodating to our work and personal lives. We’re a global company dedicated to fostering inclusivity and belonging. We value and celebrate the unique experiences, cultures, and viewpoints that each individual brings.

By embracing a wide range of backgrounds, skills, expertise, and beyond, we create a stronger, more innovative environment for our employees, clients, and communities. With us, you can always bring your full self to work. Join our inclusive, committed team to be a challenger, own outcomes, and stay curious together. Circana is proud to be Certified™ by Great Place To Work®.

This prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working rn more at

Role Overview Circana is building an agentic ecosystem on the industry's richest view of consumer behavior: intelligent systems that reason, plan, and act across the data the world's largest brands and retailers run on. This is a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role. FDEs embed with the teams who run Circana's business, in operations, client service and product, and turn what those teams know into working software: AI agents where judgment is needed, automations where a rule is enough, and the MCP servers and integrations that let both reach our systems.

You will work in a small pod with a principal engineer and domain experts, build on Circana's agent platform and tooling, and own whether the result works in production. FDEs move between engagements: embedded builds with a business team, shared platform components, and client-facing solutions.

Job Responsibilities Embed with domain experts and the engineers who own the underlying systems. Learn how the work really happens, including the exceptions, and resolve ambiguity at the source.

Decide, step by step, whether the work calls for a deterministic automation, an agent, or a person, and build whichever it is.

Build agents end to end: tools, MCP servers, context and prompt design, plan construction, tool result shaping, and guardrails.

Build integrations into real enterprise systems, including ones with thin documentation or no API: REST services, databases, file-based feeds, and schedulers.

Build and maintain the evaluation sets, graders and regression suites that measure whether a solution is right against ground truth; investigate failures down to the step that caused them.

Debug from traces: reproduce, isolate, fix, and add the test that prevents recurrence.

Automate the development loop itself: turn repeated manual work into commands, hooks, and subagents.

Move decisions forward with working prototypes.

RequirementsA track record of shipping production software that real users depended on, including AI or agentic systems.

Strong integration engineering: APIs, data pipelines, databases, and systems you did not build.

Deep practical craft with models: context management, prompting, structured outputs, and tool design.

Strong Python; productive in an unfamiliar codebase quickly.

Fluent daily use of agentic coding tools;
Claude Code preferred.

Comfortable working directly with non-technical experts, and persistent in getting to how a process actually works.

Experience running workloads on…