# Member of Technical Staff: Agent Runtime at ego

- Company: ego (YC W24)
- What the company does: AI applied research lab building synthetic sapience; human-like AI. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://egoai.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US / Remote (Tokyo, JP; SG)
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $100K to $160K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-07-28
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ego/jobs/kKt14kB-member-of-technical-staff-agent-runtime
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/ego-member-of-technical-staff-agent-runtime/

## About the role

Ego AI is a YC-backed applied AI research lab building the behavioral infrastructure for AI companions and agents. We work at the intersection of real-time conversational instincts, memory, and persistent identity; the layer that makes AI feel genuinely alive. We're a small, fast-moving team and we're defining a new category of human-AI interaction.

## What they're looking for

- 3+ years building backend or infrastructure systems, with real production ownership of stateful services or relevant projects that they have worked on
- Hands-on experience building LLM agent systems: tool-calling loops, defensive handling of model output, and step/token/cost budgets
- Deep grasp of durable execution: checkpointing, idempotency, outbox/step-log patterns, and the ability to reason precisely about failure windows (what if it dies after the side effect but before it is recorded?)
- A deliberate context-management strategy for long-horizon tasks, and the ability to defend its trade-offs rather than only describe it
- Strong API and data-model design, persistence behind clean seams, comfort being judged on docker compose up working cold from a README
- Clear written communication. Architecture docs a reviewer understands before reading the code. Honest scoping (what you cut and why)

Tags: Engineering