Every career journey is personal. That's why we empower you with the tools and support to create your own success story.

Be challenged. Be heard. Be valued. Be you ... be here.

Job Summary

The Senior Staff Software Engineer – Agentic AI will design and deliver core agent capabilities, including policy execution, reasoning, orchestration, and failure‑handling. They will build production‑ready agent runtimes—state and memory systems, planners, and tool‑routing components—while ensuring safety, reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. This role will contribute to multi‑agent workflows for classification, routing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and decisioning. The role includes implementing deterministic paths where needed, integrating graph/RAG memory, and establishing strong observability and evaluation pipelines. You will mentor engineers and help uphold high engineering standards across the team.

Essential Job Functions

Design and enhance multi‑agent frameworks and LLM‑powered autonomous systems using goal schemas, planner‑executor patterns, and well‑defined policy enforcement points. Contribute to the definition and implementation of agent state and memory architectures (short‑/long‑term, episodic, semantic) with strong PII‑minimization practices and appropriate TTL strategies. - (20%)
Implement and refine ReAct, CoT, and ToT reasoning loops, and help standardize their use across agent workflows. Build offline and online evaluation signals using curated golden datasets. Contribute to defining and implementing agent‑to‑agent communication protocols using frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI. - (15%)
Measure and improve agent decision reliability using tools such as LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, and Weights & Biases. Design deterministic tool‑chaining patterns with appropriate fallbacks, and implement safeguards including idempotency, retries, and circuit‑breaker logic. Contribute to integrating grounding techniques to ensure accurate and reliable agent behavior. - (15%)
Architect and implement safety controls such as scoped tool access, allow/deny actions, validators, red‑team hooks, and human‑escalation paths. Use AgentSpec to define and apply Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) that prevent high‑risk or irreversible agent actions. - (15%)
Operate and scale production agentic AI platforms on Kubernetes by defining agent‑centric SLOs, instrumenting deep telemetry (reasoning quality, hallucination rates, tool latency), and supporting on‑call through agent‑assisted triage, automated rollback/roll‑forward, and human‑gated controls. - (15%)
Establish enterprise safety guardrails, ethical guidelines, and compliance standards to ensure agents operate within legal, regulatory, and organizational boundaries, especially in high‑risk or financial workflows. - (10%)
Partner with Product to shape AI strategy and agent user experiences, and collaborate with data and backend teams to ensure agents access high‑quality, real‑time data across SQL systems, CRMs, SaaS platforms, APIs, and event streams within existing architectures. - (5%)
Communicate complex agentic concepts—such as CoT, RAG, and safety controls—to non‑technical stakeholders to build trust and organizational readiness. Model resilience around model failures and promote AI‑native engineering practices, including prompt design and evaluation techniques, across teams. - (5%)

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.
12+ years of experience in Software Engineering including 2+ years in AI/ML, LLMs, agent-based systems or large-scale distributed systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen) and 3+ years of experience implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Preferred Qualifications

Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.
15+ years of experience in Software Engineering including 3+ years of experience in AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen), 4+ years of experience in Fintech/payments integrations; PCI and data protection familiarity and 4+ years of experience in implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Skills

Agent Based Modeling
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Datadog
OpenAI
Grafana
Graph Databases
Large Language Models (LLMs)
PostgreSQL
Prometheus (Software)
New Relic
Redis
Telemetry

Reports To

Director and above

Direct Reports

0

Work Environment

Normal office environment. (Remote or Hybrid), 3 to 4 days per month are required in office if within 60 miles of a Bread Financial location. On-call rotation to include evenings or weekends.

Physical and Mental Requirements

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential job function satisfactorily and meet the physical, mental and work environment requirements. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform essential job functions, absent undue hardship.

Other Duties

This job description is illustrative of the types of duties typically performed by this job. It is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of each and every essential function of the job. Because job content may change from time to time, the Company reserves the right to add and/or delete essential functions from this job at any time.

Salary Range

(unless otherwise noted below): $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Full Salary Range for position:

California: $178,900.00 - $416,600.00
Colorado: $155,600.00 - $349,900.00
New York: $171,100.00 - $416,600.00
Washington: $163,300.00 - $383,300.00
Maryland: $163,300.00 - $366,600.00
Washington DC: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00
Illinois: $155,600.00 - $366,600.00
New Jersey: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00
Vermont: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00
Ohio: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

The actual base pay within this range may be dependent upon many factors, which may include, but are not limited to, work location, education, experience, and skills.

About Bread Financial®

At Bread Financial, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community, and be part of our award-winning culture. We’ve been consistently recognized as a best place to work nationally and in many markets and we’re proud to promote an environment where you feel appreciated, accepted, valued, and fulfilled—both personally and professionally. Bread Financial supports the overall wellness of our associates with a diverse suite of benefits and offers boundless opportunities for career development and non-traditional career progression.

Bread Financial® (NYSE: BFH) is a tech-forward financial services company that provides simple, personalized payment, lending and saving solutions to millions of U.S. consumers. Our payment solutions deliver growth for some of the most recognized brands in travel & entertainment, health & beauty, technology, electronics, jewelry, home and specialty apparel through our co-brand and private label credit cards and pay-over-time products providing choice and value to our shared customers.

Bread Financial proudly marks 30 years of success in 2026. To learn more about our global associates, our performance and our sustainability progress, visit breadfinancial.com or follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Bread Financial offers competitive pay, a comprehensive selection of benefit options including 401(k).

The Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Any applicant offered employment will be required to establish that they are legally authorized to work in the United States for the Company.

The Company participates in E-Verify.

The Company will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with a criminal history, in a manner consistent with the requirements of all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the New York City Fair Chance Act. Applicants with criminal histories are encouraged to apply.

The Company complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended, and all applicable state/local laws. The Company will provide accommodations to applicants needing accommodations to complete the application process. Applicants with disabilities may contact the Company to request and arrange for accommodations. If you need assistance to accommodate a disability, you may request an accommodation at any time. Please contact the Recruiting Team at TaOps@breadfinancial.com.