Staff Engineer – Agentic AI

About the Role

Republic Services is the second largest environmental services companies in North America — ~40K employees, thousands of trucks, hundreds of facilities, and a mountain of operational data that has never had an AI layer on top of it. We have a backlog of hundreds of Agentic AI ideas that we need to deliver and a foundation of ontologies, evaluations, guardrails, etc... that we need to build. We're hiring a Staff Engineer now to be the first hire and plan to expand the team aggressively. You will own that platform end to end, not manage the people.

What you'll work on

• Agent orchestration: tool calling, planner/executor and multi-agent patterns, MCP/A2A integrations with enterprise systems
• Making enterprise context reliably available at inference time — retrieval, memory, hybrid search, reranking, access controls
• LLMOps that isn't hand-wavy: evals and golden datasets, prompt/agent versioning, tracing, token and cost budgets, CI/CD for agents
• Safety in a regulated enterprise: prompt injection, data exfiltration, PII handling, human-in-the-loop, audit logging

You should have

• 7–10+ years building and scaling production systems, with recent, hands-on GenAI/agentic work in production (not just demos)
• Shipped agents or LLM pipelines at scale
• Solid data chops — vector stores, chunking, hybrid search, knowing when retrieval is the wrong answer
• Cloud experience (we're primarily AWS / Bedrock); comfortable with both containers and serverless
• Track record of technical leadership and mentoring without needing a manager title

Nice to have:

• LangGraph / Semantic Kernel / PydanticAI
• GraphRAG
• Knowledge graphs
• LangFuse/LangSmith
• Multimodal

Comp & benefits

$175k is our midpoint for salary + 20% annual target bonus, 401(k) with company match, ESPP, medical/dental/vision, PTO. Remote eligible, prefer AZ timezones +/-1. Not sponsorship eligible.

Why you should want to work here

We build cool stuff email me (jgardner@republicservices.com) directly with the most interesting agent you've shipped.