Senior AI Automation Engineer

About the role

This is applied agent engineering: tool‑using AI systems built on real business data, embedded in the workflows people live in every day, trusted enough to be part of how the work actually gets done. This is foundational work. It shapes how Better Up wins in the AI era, and how many more people grow through what we build.

You’ll embed with HR, Sales, Customer Success, Coach Operations, Legal, and Finance to do three things:

• Understand how people actually work, with sufficient detail to build the right solutions

• Apply AI to fit the workflow as it is, not as a redesign would have it

• Reimagine what comes next, once you’ve earned the team’s trust

We are a company of AI builders. Across every function, people are shipping their own agents, Claude skills, and projects. We have the latitude to act and an explicit push from leadership to do it. This role exists to multiply our team’s leverage and to rebuild Better Up from first principles around what AI makes possible.

The split is roughly 30% product, 70% engineering. On the product side, you’ll map workflows, define success metrics, and decide what’s worth automating versus what’s worth redesigning.

On the engineering side:

• Build the infrastructure for reliable, powerful agents: MCP servers, stateful sub‑agents, agent skills, and instrumentation that ensures durable success

• Integrate across the systems Better Up runs on:
  Slack, Jira, Salesforce, Okta, Workday, Google Workspace, AWS

• Set the bar for effective, safe and reliable agentic access. This work touches coaching data, employee data, and partner data, and Better Up is a company built on trust

• Build reusable skills and tools that the rest of the company can leverage

• Multiply your impact: review other builders’ integrations, share patterns, raise the floor on what non‑engineers can ship safely

You experiment with new models, agent frameworks, and orchestration patterns on your own time because you can’t help it. Claude, the Anthropic SDK, and MCP are already in your toolkit. You’ve replaced parts of your own work or life with agents you built yourself, you read model release notes the day they drop, you pay for the tools out of pocket, and you have a strong opinion about why one agent framework beats another for a given problem.

You publish your work where you can: open‑source, write‑ups, demos, or conference talks.

You also bring:

• 7+ years of engineering experience, with a track record of shipping real systems at scale

• The ability to sit with a non‑technical operator, understand their actual workflow rather than what they think the solution is, and translate it into a working agent or automation

• A founder’s bias for action and a senior engineer’s obsession with quality

• Full‑lifecycle ownership, from the first discovery call to the tenth production bug

• Comfort when the problem isn’t fully scoped, and a preference for finding the right work over waiting for it

At Better Up, we are committed to living out our mission every day and that starts with providing benefits that allow our employees to care for themselves, support their families, and give back to their community.

• Access to Better Up coaching; one for you and one for a friend or family member

• A competitive compensation plan with opportunity for advancement

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Flexible paid time off

• Per year:

  • All federal/statutory holidays observed

  • 4 Better Up Inner Workdays

  • 5 Volunteer Days to give back

  • Learning and Development stipend

  • Company wide Summer & Winter breaks

• Year‑round charitable contribution of your choice on behalf of Better Up

• 401(k) self contribution

The base salary range for this role is as follows:

$165,000 – $230,000

Better Up is a hybrid company that values in‑person collaboration. Our US hub locations include:
Austin, TX;
New York City, NY;
San Francisco, CA; and the Arlington, VA.

• Hybrid Expectation: You will be expected to work from your local office at least 2 days per week (or 8 days per month) and should be able to realistically commit to this structure before applying. This hybrid role will require travel up to 25% of the time for…