---
title: 'Agent Systems Engineer at adaption'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/agent-systems-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-h8cqnbdpdary'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Agent Systems Engineer at adaption

- **Company:** adaption
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/adaption/23ae2f19-4917-4e6a-8e0d-0e928c531019

## Job description

## THE ROLE

You'll build the agent systems at the core of our product. These systems turn customer goals into reliable, multi-step execution across real tools and services.

This is not about building demos. You'll work on agents that operate under real constraints: incomplete information, external failures, limited budgets, and unpredictable traffic. You'll own how they plan, use tools, recover from errors, and improve over time.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Design agent architectures for planning, reasoning, tool use, memory, and integration with external systems and data.
- Improve reliability on long-running, multi-step tasks, including failure recovery.
- Build the loops that let agents improve with real use, so performance compounds instead of staying frozen.
- Develop evaluations that measure agent performance and resist being gamed.
- Make practical tradeoffs between quality, latency, cost, and complexity.

## QUALIFICATIONS

- 5+ years building production ML or backend systems, including taking LLM or agent applications from prototype to production.
- Strong understanding of agent design: planning, reasoning, tool use, orchestration, and memory.
- Experience building rigorous evaluation systems, plus execution tracing and observability for agents, with a focus on reproducibility.
- Familiarity with the OpenAI Responses API, MCP, and server- versus client-side execution.

Above all, we're looking for great teammates who make work feel lighter and aren't afraid to go out on a limb with bold ideas. You don't need to be perfect, but you do need to be adaptable. We encourage you to apply, even if you don't check every box.

## ABOUT US

Most AI is frozen in place - it doesn't adapt to the world. We think that's backwards. Our mandate is to build efficient intelligence that evolves in real-time. Our vision is AI systems that are flexible, personalized, and accessible to everyone. We believe efficiency is what makes this possible - it's how we expand access and ensure innovation benefits the many, not the few. We believe in talent density: bringing together the best and most driven individuals to push the boundaries of continual adaptation. We're looking for builders and creative thinkers ready to shape the next era of intelligence.

## BENEFITS

- Flexible work: In-person collaboration in the Bay Area, a distributed global-first team, and team offsites.
- Adaption Passport: Annual travel stipend to explore a country you've never visited. We're building intelligence that evolves alongside you, so we encourage you to keep expanding your horizons.
- Lunch Stipend: Weekly meal allowance for take-out or grocery delivery.
- Well-Being: Comprehensive medical benefits and generous paid time off.

## About adaption

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Adaption builds adaptive AI systems that learn continuously and efficiently, moving beyond static models and expensive retraining cycles.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed Stage – $50M raised) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available (founding team assembled around late 2025 / early 2026)
- **Founders**: Sara Hooker (former VP Research at Cohere) and Sudip Roy (former Director of Inference Computing at Cohere) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
- **Target Customers**: B2B / Enterprise (hiring for Head of Enterprise Sales) [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Mission / Purpose**: Build extremely efficient AI that adapts in real time, treating constraints like latency, memory, cost, and energy as first-class design inputs so that intelligence evolves through interaction rather than brute-force scaling. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)

## Products & Services
- **[Adaptive Intelligence Platform]**: A system designed for continuous, on-the-fly learning without costly retraining or extensive prompt engineering. Combines adaptive data shaping, gradient-free learning, and co-designed hardware-algorithms to deliver highly efficient, domain-adaptable AI tailored to each task. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/) – currently in waitlist phase.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed (company declined to provide) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Key Metric**: $50M Seed Funding (led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, and Neo) [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Emergence Capital (lead), Mozilla Ventures, Fifty Years, Threshold Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, E14 Fund, Neo [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 15 employees with +58.8% monthly growth; 23 active job postings; operates in 5 countries (US, Canada, India, Brazil, Peru); research team has 150+ publications across top AI conferences; backers include key players in AI and venture capital [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Efficiency-first approach**: Unlike most labs chasing scale, Adaption prioritises low compute, low cost, and continuous adaptation – treating constraints as innovation drivers.
- **Real-time learning**: Enables models to update on-the-fly without retraining or fine-tuning, reducing enterprise overhead and latency.
- **World-class research talent**: Team brings deep expertise from Cohere, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon, with a track record of influential publications (including work on the “slow death of scaling”) [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)
- **Co-design of hardware and algorithms**: Systems are built from the ground up with serving constraints in mind, promising better efficiency at scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current Priority**: Move from waitlist to product-market fit, hiring across research, engineering, GTM, and design to build and deploy the first generation of adaptive AI for enterprise customers.
- **Direction for Growth**: Expand the platform to multiple industries and specialisations while continuing research into adaptive compute, on-the-fly alignment, and dynamic learning strategies. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Emphasises efficiency, real-world interaction, and product excellence as core design values. The team is small (~15 people), offering high impact and ownership from day one.
- **Work Model**: Hybrid, remote, and onsite options available across locations including San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, and Singapore [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
- **Roles**: Open positions in research (Research Scientist, Applied ML Engineer), engineering (Distributed Systems, Inference Platform), GTM (Growth Lead, Head of Enterprise Sales), and design (Product Designer). Contracts and full-time available.
- **Notable Perks**: Work with world-class AI researchers, access to strong funding runway, and the chance to define an entirely new approach to AI that challenges the dominant scaling paradigm.

## Sources
1. [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/02/04/adaption-labs-50-million-seed-funding-emergence-captial-sara-hooker-sudip-roy-ai-models-that-learn-on-the-fly/)
2. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/adaption-labs)
3. [Website](https://adaptionlabs.ai/)
4. [Careers](https://adaptionlabs.ai/careers)
5. [Research Page](https://www.adaptionlabs.ai/research)

## Other roles at adaption

- [Applied Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-scientist-adaption-san-francisco-f8neken5dreh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Inference Performance Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/inference-performance-engineer-adaption-san-francisco-4zph5352xw0h) — San Francisco, CA
- [Platform Engineer, APIs and Security](https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-apis-and-security-adaption-san-francisco-m5790sxrdh93) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding GTM Lead (North America)](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-gtm-lead-north-america-adaption-united-states-hckjtb0982gr) — United States
- [Modelling Resident](https://feeny.ai/job/modelling-resident-adaption-united-kingdom-dvtjh2en67mp) — United Kingdom
- [Senior Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-research-scientist-adaption-united-states-7zjjgvcywxmc) — United States
- [Research Scientist / Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-adaption-united-states-gmjs4gbd3y7b) — United States