Senior Software Developer, AI Agents - Knak, Remote

About this opportunity

Knak exists to empower marketers to be creative. In a world where AI has made everyone a creator, Knak helps marketers turn ideas into on-brand, high-performing campaigns at scale. We are built by marketers, for marketers, providing a flexible factory for the middle stretch of the marketing stack that traditionally runs on handoffs and copy-paste. We are looking for an experienced software developer to build and scale the AI agents behind Knak's platform.

Your impact

In this role you will develop the agent harness itself, including orchestration, tool calling, context management, and guardrails that let agents analyze data and generate complex marketing assets. Your responsibilities include:

• Build the agent harness: Design and implement the core agent runtime in Python: orchestration loops, tool definitions and execution, memory and context management, structured outputs, and failure handling.
• Own agent evaluations: Build and maintain eval datasets, automated evaluators, and LLM-as-judge pipelines (LangSmith) so every prompt, model, or harness change is measured, not guessed at.
• Iterate on agent quality: Diagnose agent failures from traces, tune prompts and tool designs, and run model comparisons and benchmarks to drive measurable improvements.
• Create AI microservices: Build Python and Node.js services for agent hosting and LLM interaction.
• Build reliable APIs: Develop and maintain the Laravel (PHP) APIs that integrate agents into the Knak platform, ensuring testability, observability, and performance.
• Deploy to the cloud: Use AWS services (Lambda, Bedrock, CDN delivery) to build secure, scalable infrastructure for agents.
• Optimize databases: Tune MySQL queries and indexing to improve speed and reduce latency.
• Elevate code quality: Lead and participate in code reviews, maintaining high standards across the team.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work with product, design, QA, and DevOps to align solutions with business needs.
• Mentor engineers: Share knowledge on agent development and evaluation practices, and set a high bar for technical excellence.

Requirements

To be successful in this role, you should bring the following qualifications:

• 6+ years of software development experience
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered agents in production, including tool calling, orchestration, context management, and prompt engineering
• Experience designing and running evaluations for LLM systems, including dataset curation, automated evaluators, LLM-as-judge, and regression tracking
• Strong proficiency in Python, Node.js, and MySQL
• Expertise in RESTful APIs, TDD, CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
• Experience with SaaS architecture, microservices, and AWS
• Knowledge of observability, performance tuning, and scalability
• Familiarity with Docker/Kubernetes
• Excellent problem-solving skills and a collaborative mindset

Benefits

Knak offers a rewarding work environment acknowledged by Ottawa's Best Places to Work 2025. Total rewards include:

• Competitive salaries
• Equity in the company
• Great benefits
• Paid vacation
• Life leave days
• Team lunches and off-sites
• Commitment to your career growth