--- title: 'Lead AI Product Engineer - AI Agents & Emerging Products at System1' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-ai-product-engineer-ai-agents-emerging-products-system1-los-angeles-sbmgmjtm2p7e' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Lead AI Product Engineer - AI Agents & Emerging Products at System1 - **Company:** System1 - **Location:** Los Angeles, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-01-14 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/system1/84bab2c5-da41-4eea-bab7-31ddcdfc8cbc ## Job description System1 is building the next generation of AI Agent–powered consumer products, and we’re looking for a Lead AI Product Engineer to help lead the effort. You’ll design, build, and operate our most ambitious AI agent systems from early prototypes through production, owning core architecture, reliability, and performance as these products scale. This is a high-impact, hands-on engineering role for a builder who can move quickly from concept to working systems, shipping, iterating, and hardening real agent workflows that deliver consumer value at scale. This role sits at the intersection of multi-agent orchestration, agentic coding, and production engineering, offering the opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI while directly influencing real-world product outcomes and business performance. You do not need prior experience with every protocol or framework listed below—we value strong systems thinking, production experience, and the ability to learn fast in emerging domains. What You’ll Do: - Build and operate multi-agent systems that plan, coordinate, and execute tasks across multiple tools and services, to solve real user problems at scale. - Implement agentic coding workflows, where agents generate code, run tests, create diffs or PRs, and iterate autonomously within guardrails. - Design agent orchestration layers (planners, supervisors, evaluators) to manage task decomposition, retries, and long-running execution. - Instrument and monitor agent behavior across success, failure, latency, cost, and human overrides, with exposure to agent-to-tool payment flows as the ecosystem evolves. - Collaborate with Product & Design to translate user problems into shippable agent workflows, iterating quickly based on real-world feedback. What You’ll Bring: - Strong experience building LLM-powered systems in production, including prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool/function calling, and agentic coding workflows where agents write, modify, and validate code within guardrails. - Solid backend engineering skills with Python and/or Node.js, designing APIs, async services, and background workers that support long-running, stateful agent workflows. - Experience designing multi-step, agent-driven execution loops (plan → act → evaluate → retry), with explicit state management, idempotency, and failure recovery. - Comfort with distributed systems primitives (queues, pub/sub, durable state, rate limiting, concurrency controls) required to coordinate agents at scale. - Proven ability to instrument and observe agent behavior, emitting structured events for task success, failures, retries, overrides, and code-generation outcomes. - Experience deploying and operating systems on cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), using Docker and CI/CD pipelines. - Familiarity with inter-agent communication patterns, including message schemas, shared memory, blackboard systems, or event-driven coordination. - Experience implementing agent evaluation pipelines (prompt regression tests, simulation-based evals, automated scoring, human-in-the-loop review). - Understanding of cost-aware execution for agents (dynamic model routing, caching, batching, budget constraints). - Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, and persistent memory strategies. - Exposure to emerging agent protocols (e.g., x402 payment flows, MCP), with the ability to implement evolving specs pragmatically. Who You Are: - You operate with high urgency, agency, and a bias for action, translating ideas into working systems quickly, learning from real-world signals, and iterating continuously. - You pair speed with rigor, bringing strong engineering fundamentals (systems thinking, evaluation discipline, reliability) so each iteration is meaningfully better, not just different. - You embrace a “long is wrong” mindset, simplifying, automating, and removing bottlenecks to consistently reduce cycle time. - You think and act like an owner, making sound tradeoffs and taking end-to-end accountability for performance, reliability, cost, and user experience. - You optimize for technological leverage, building reusable primitives, tooling, and patterns that compound team output over time. - You are growth-minded, working backward from LTV/CAC and prioritizing engineering work that moves activation, retention, conversion, and cost per successful outcome. - You excel at constraint removal, unblocking execution and increasing innovation per unit time, including through agentic tool use with clear guardrails and observability. What We Have To Offer: - Competitive salary + bonus + equity - Generous PTO + 11 company holidays - Open sick time - 100% covered Medical, Dental, Vision for employees - 401k with match - Health & Dependent Care Flex Spending Account - Paid professional development - Leadership & growth opportunities - Virtual company and team building events The U.S. base salary range for this full-time position is $161,800 - $242,700 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in U.S. role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. System1’s headquarters is located in Marina del Rey, CA with an additional office in Bellevue, WA. Employees near office locations are returning to the office. Equal Employment Opportunity: System1 provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. ## About System1 ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: System1 is an omnichannel digital marketing platform that uses AI and machine learning to monetize internet traffic by connecting advertisers with high-intent customers. - **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: SST) - **Headquarters**: Marina del Rey, California, United States - **Founded**: 2013 - **Founders**: Michael Blend and Charles Ursini ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Digital Marketing, Advertising Technology (AdTech), Software Development, Consumer Internet - **Target customers**: B2B (advertisers and advertising partners across hundreds of verticals), B2C (consumers via owned brands like MapQuest, HowStuffWorks, Info.com, and Startpage) - **Mission or purpose statement**: System1 aims to deliver high-intent customers to advertising partners while building powerful consumer brands and developing privacy-focused products. ## Products & Services - **RAMP (Responsive Acquisition Marketing Platform)**: A closed-loop digital customer acquisition platform using proprietary algorithms, intent data, and auctioning technology to enable customer acquisition at scale. - **Owned & Operated Publishing Websites**: A portfolio of brands reaching 120 million consumers each month across verticals like health, automotive, personal finance, travel, and entertainment. Key brands include MapQuest, HowStuffWorks, Info.com, and Startpage (a private search engine). - **Applications Portfolio**: A growing portfolio of mobile and web applications leveraging audience expansion capabilities. - **Privacy Products**: Development and operation of privacy-focused services, including the world’s most private search engine (Startpage) and a privacy-friendly browser (Waterfox). ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: $95.3 million (as of recent data) - **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $266.1 million; Q2 FY2026 (quarter ended June 30, 2026) revenue was $30.2 million. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Public company; notable partners include major digital ad networks and monetization channels (search, display, video, commerce, lead generation, subscription). - **Growth Signals**: Completed strategic acquisitions including CouponFollow (2022), InfoSpace (2016 for $45M), and Waterfox (2020). Workforce distributed across 12 countries. Recent hiring for AI-focused roles (Lead AI Product Engineer, Lead Product Manager - AI Agents) signals investment in emerging technologies. ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary AI & Machine Learning Platform (RAMP)**: A differentiated, closed-loop platform that optimizes customer acquisition across hundreds of verticals and monetization channels. - **Diverse Brand Portfolio**: Ownership of well-known, high-traffic consumer brands (MapQuest, HowStuffWorks, Startpage) provides a large, direct audience and significant data assets. - **Privacy Leadership**: A strong commitment to user privacy, operating the world’s most private search engine and a privacy-friendly browser, positioning the company favorably in a privacy-conscious market. - **Omnichannel & Omnivertical Capability**: The platform integrates with every major ad network and operates across hundreds of verticals, reducing dependency on any single channel or sector. ## Strategic Focus - **AI & Emerging Products**: Actively investing in AI agents and emerging product areas, as evidenced by dedicated leadership roles (Lead AI Product Engineer, Lead Product Manager for AI Agents). - **Privacy-First Innovation**: Continuing to develop and expand privacy-focused products and services, seeing it as a core duty and market differentiator. - **Portfolio Growth & Optimization**: Managing and growing a portfolio of owned brands (publishing, search, apps) while leveraging the RAMP platform for customer acquisition. - **Talent Acquisition**: Hiring senior leadership in engineering, product management, and growth strategy to drive technical strategy and execution. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Values**: Emphasizes a growth mindset, ambitious goals, teamwork, respect, open communication, and individual responsibility. Promotes an environment where different backgrounds and points of view are valued. - **Work Environment**: Offers a mix of in-office and on-site roles (e.g., Los Angeles, CA). The company has 7 offices across the US, including locations in Marina del Rey, Bellevue, and Guelph (Canada). - **Perks & Benefits**: Great compensation, 401k with company match, excellent benefits, education subsidy, in-office events, weekly workouts, employee resource groups, volunteer opportunities, lunch & learns, access to LinkedIn Learning, monthly all-team events, team building events, and hackathons. - **Engineering Culture**: Described as having an incredible group of engineers, product managers, and data scientists. The company holds hackathons and encourages creative innovation. Recent job postings include Senior Director of Engineering – Technical Strategy & Execution. - **Growth Opportunities**: As a public company with a history of acquisitions and a focus on AI, there are opportunities to work on cutting-edge technology and be part of a growing organization. ## Sources 1. [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/system1co) 2. [system1.com/careers](https://system1.com/careers) 3. [system1.com/who-we-are](https://system1.com/who-we-are) 4. [system1.com/what-we-do](https://system1.com/what-we-do) 5. [jobs.lever.co/system1](https://jobs.lever.co/system1) ## Other roles at System1 - [General Manager, Startpage](https://feeny.ai/job/general-manager-startpage-system1-los-angeles-5n93ja2wdf00) — Los Angeles, CA - [Senior Media Buyer, Subscription Products](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-media-buyer-subscription-products-system1-los-angeles-s0b20h5q4vb8) — Los Angeles, CA - [Lead Product Manager - AI Agents & Emerging Products](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-product-manager-ai-agents-emerging-products-system1-los-angeles-tt4hzeztrvfk) — Los Angeles, CA - [Senior Growth Strategist, Startpage](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-growth-strategist-startpage-system1-los-angeles-424tb040r6e1) — Los Angeles, CA