AI Staff Engineer| Hybrid: Chicago, IL 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 at Circana. Learn more at www.circana.com.

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. Forward Deployed Engineers are the delivery core of that effort. Working in small pods alongside an architect and domain experts, they take agents from design to production, make the engineering calls along the way, and own whether the result works.

Job Responsibilities

• Build AI solutions and Agents end to end: graphs, tools, MCP servers, and the services behind them, from design through production and iteration.
• Practice the working craft of agents and their harness daily: context management, prompt design, plan construction, tool result shaping, and guardrails.
• Build and maintain the evaluation sets and regression suites that measure whether an agent is improving; investigate failures down to the step that caused them.
• Work directly with domain experts: collect the questions practitioners really ask, map them to the right capability, and resolve ambiguity at the source.
• 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.

Requirements

• A track record of building and shipping agentic systems that reached real users.
• Deep practical craft with models: context management, prompting, plan generation, structured outputs, and tool design.
• Strong Python; productive in an unfamiliar codebase quickly.
• Experience running agentic workloads on a major cloud platform; ours can be learned quickly.
• Fluent daily use of agentic coding tools; Claude Code preferred.
• Clear written communication under time pressure.
• Demonstrated self-direction: work they initiated, built, or fixed without being asked.

Preferred

• Production experience across multiple model families.
• Working TypeScript and solid SQL.
• Front end capability: React, TypeScript, CopilotKit or similar.
• Data engineering on large transactional datasets.
• Evaluation and observability tooling.
• Contributions to agent frameworks or MCP servers.

Tech Stack & Tools

• Orchestration: LangGraph, Google ADK, Microsoft Agent Framework
• Models: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, open-weight families
• Cloud: GCP Vertex AI, Azure AI Foundry
• Protocols: MCP, A2A, AG-UI, A2UI
• Engineering: Python, TypeScript, SQL, Claude Code
• Delivery: evaluation harnesses as CI, tracing and observability tooling

Circana Behaviors

Beyond technical skills, experience, and role-specific attributes, these shared behaviors are fundamental to our culture and success. We seek individuals who consistently demonstrate and champion these behaviors in their daily work:

• Stay Curious: Being hungry to learn and grow, always asking the big questions.
• Seek Clarity: Embracing complexity to create clarity and inspire action.
• Own the Outcome: Being accountable for decisions and taking ownership of our choices.
• Center on the Client: Relentlessly adding value for our customers.
• Be a Challenger: Never complacent, always striving for continuous improvement.
• Champion Inclusivity: Fostering trust in relationships engaging with empathy, respect, and integrity.
• Commit to each other: Contributing to making Circana a great place to work for everyone.

Location: This position can be located in the following area(s): Chicago, IL (Hybrid) or NYC, NY (Hybrid)

The below range reflects the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, geographic location, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, any collective bargaining agreements, and business or organizational needs. The salary range for this role is $160,000 USD to $200,000 USD.

This job is also eligible for bonus pay.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance and 401(k) to eligible employees.

An offer of employment may be conditional upon successful completion of a background check in accordance with local legislation and our candidate privacy notice. Your current employer will not be contacted without your permission.

You can apply for this role through the Circana careers website or Intranet site for internal candidates. This role is subject to AI-assisted screening. Circana uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assess resumes for alignment with job requirements by helping locate details in resumes that relate to the job description.

This position is expected to remain open for approximately 30 days and may close earlier if sufficient qualified candidates are identified.