Lead AI Engineer Job Palo Alto area,California USA,Software Development

Lead AI Engineer

Join Powerline and help build the future of autonomous energy systems.

Powerline is a fast-growing, VC-backed climate tech company transforming how renewable energy and battery storage assets operate on the electricity grid. Our technology combines machine learning, optimization, and market intelligence to help asset owners monitor, analyze, and maximize operational performance in the world's most complex energy markets.

We work with leading developers, traders, and operators across global electricity markets, solving high-impact problems that accelerate the transition to a more flexible, decarbonized grid.

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to design and build an agentic system that can reason over complex data, orchestrate modeling workflows, and autonomously generate insights and decisions related to energy asset operations.

This role focuses on building production-grade AI systems used by experts in energy markets. You will develop systems that combine LLMs, time-series data, and optimization engines into intelligent agents that operate across both interactive workflows and autonomous workflows. You will play a foundational role in defining how AI systems understand and interact with energy assets and electricity markets.

What You'll Build

You will design and deploy Powerline's AI Agents to:

answer complex questions, explain algorithm results, and act as a decision-support tool;

run continuous tasks and be proactive, without human intervention; and

iterate, evaluate, and inference with Powerline data and infrastructure

These systems will operate in high-stakes environments where correctness and reliability directly impact economic decisions.

Core Responsibilities

Architect and build agentic AI systems that plan, reason, and act across workflows
Design tool-using agents that integrate with Powerline systems
Develop multi-step decision systems
Build stateful and long-running agents
Define and implement evaluation frameworks
Improve reliability, observability, and safety of LLM-based systems in production
Collaborate with energy market specialists to translate real-world workflows into agent behavior and logic
Help lead technical direction for agent architecture and system design

Requirements

Experience building production AI or software systems, including work with LLM-powered or agentic applications
Strong Python skills and experience integrating with APIs and external systems
Experience designing multi-step or stateful systems (e.g., pipelines, workflows, or agents)
Experience building memory and Retrieval Augmental Generation (RAG) frameworks
Experience with Agent evaluation from direct user feedback
Experience with Agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., Pydantic AI, Lang Chain, or similar)
Ability to operate across engineering, product, and applied AI
Strong ownership mindset and comfort building 0→1 systems in fast-paced environments
Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate across technical and domain teams

Strong Plus

Experience building systems with partial or full autonomy in real-world environments
Experience working with real-time or streaming data pipelines
Experience in electricity markets, trading, or energy systems
Experience with time-series modeling or forecasting
Experience with optimization systems