AI Engineer, Agents and Evaluation

About this role

Company Overview:

Pronoia Energy is a pioneering deep tech startup at the forefront of quantum energy storage innovation. As a lean, mission-driven team, we thrive on rapid prototyping, cross-disciplinary collaboration and solving complex engineering challenges to turn quantum physics into practical, scalable products. Our current focus is on developing our groundbreaking room-temperature macroscopic quantum energy storage technology that promises orders of magnitude greater energy density, faster charging, and higher power delivery as well as being cheaper and safer compared to existing battery technology. This represents a paradigm shift in energy storage with applications spanning consumer electronics, electric vehicles, renewable grids, and beyond.

Role Summary:

To meet our ambitious goals we are building an internal, grounded, agentic AI system that accelerates our research, and we are hiring an AI Engineer to build two things: the orchestration that plans and routes the work, and the verification layer that stops the system from stating anything it cannot support. It is a founding, high-leverage role, and you will own the part of the stack that decides what counts as true before the team acts on it. In this role you will build the agent orchestrator that plans a research question into steps and routes each step to the right tool, and the first verification gate and evaluation harness that catch the system before it states anything unsupported. You will enforce our defining rule: factual questions go to retrieval, computational questions go to tools, and nothing is answered from the model's own memory. You will stand up a self-hosted open-weights model on our own hardware and build the entire agent loop around it. This is a founding generalist role, and early on you will wear several hats across orchestration, serving, and evaluation. This role is onsite in Torrance, California.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build the agent orchestrator and the tool-...