Staff / Senior Staff Engineer, AI Agent Engineering in London

Staff / Senior Staff Engineer, AI Agent Engineering in London

London Full-Time 63000 - 77000 £ / year (est.) Home office (partial)
Equinix, Inc.

At a Glance

  • Tasks: Design and build AI agents that transform software delivery processes.
  • Company: Equinix, a leader in digital infrastructure with a culture of innovation.
  • Benefits: Competitive salary, remote work options, and opportunities for professional growth.
  • Other info: Join a dynamic team that values fresh ideas and fosters collaboration.
  • Why this job: Shape the future of AI engineering and make a real impact on software development.
  • Qualifications: 6+ years of software engineering experience and expertise in AI applications.

The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.

Who are we? Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. A place where bold ideas are welcomed, human connection is valued, and everyone has the opportunity to shape their future. Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.

Build the Agents That Build Our Software

Most engineering roles now come with AI tools. This one comes with a mission. Equinix Incubation builds the agentic systems that run the software delivery lifecycle end to end: from intake and business case through design, code, test, release, and value tracking, with humans directing the work and owning every gate. We are hiring Staff and Senior Staff Engineers to build those agents and the platform they run on. You will not just use AI to code faster. You will design, ship, evaluate, and harden production agents that colleagues across a global organization trust with real delivery work. Your agents will write software; your engineering decides what ships.

What You'll Do

  • Build Production AI Agents: Design, build, and ship LLM-powered agents that execute real lifecycle work: intake triage, estimation, requirements, technical design, coding, testing, release, and operations.
  • Engineer the scaffolding that makes agents dependable: tool use via MCP, agent-to-agent handoffs (A2A), event-driven orchestration, and deep Jira and enterprise system integration.
  • Build on Equinix's enterprise AI platform: AI gateway, orchestration, audit, and access control, with security and privacy by design.
  • Make Agents Trustworthy: Evals, Guardrails, Gates: Design and automate eval suites that measure agent output quality on every change, and make passing evals the release gate for agents. Define guardrails, human-in-the-loop approval points, review thresholds, and escalation paths, so agent autonomy is earned, not assumed. Instrument agent behavior end to end (quality, latency, cost, adoption), find failure patterns, and tune prompts, context, and configurations until the numbers move.
  • Engineer Context and Knowledge: Build the knowledge layers agents depend on: retrieval over process libraries, decision histories, code, and delivery data. Establish reusable prompt patterns, context standards, and agent configurations that other teams adopt. Own agents through their full lifecycle: instructions, context freshness, performance monitoring, feedback, and retirement.
  • Ship the Platform and Raise the Bar: Contribute to the orchestrator, persona consoles, and dashboards that keep humans in command of agent-led delivery. Dogfood relentlessly: use agents to build agent systems, and feed what you learn back into the platform. Bring strong engineering craft. The fundamentals still decide whether this works: architecture, code quality, testing, CI/CD, and cloud-native design.

What Success Looks Like

  • Agents you built are doing live delivery work, with measurable cycle-time and quality gains, and humans confidently in control.
  • Your eval suites are the reason people trust agent output; “passes evals” means something because you made it mean something.
  • Your context patterns, guardrails, and agent standards are reused by teams you have never met.
  • You can explain to an executive, in plain language, what an agent did, why, and how you know.
  • The platform gets simpler, faster, and cheaper as it scales, because you treat agent cost and reliability as engineering problems.

Level Expectations

  • Staff: You deliver complete agents and platform components within established patterns, own their evals and quality end to end, and are the dependable engine of your pod.
  • Senior Staff: You set the patterns. You take the hardest, most ambiguous problems (orchestration, eval design, agent reliability at scale), define the standards others follow, and multiply the team.

Required Qualifications

  • 6+ years (Staff) or 9+ years (Senior Staff) of professional software engineering experience, with a record of shipping and operating production systems.
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications or agents: prompt and context engineering, tool calling, retrieval, or multi-agent workflows.
  • Experience designing evaluations for AI systems, or strong test-engineering instincts you are eager to apply to non‑deterministic software.
  • Strong proficiency in Python or TypeScript, plus solid API, microservices, and event-driven architecture skills.
  • Fluency with modern engineering practice: Git, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and cloud platforms.
  • Sound judgment about when to trust automation and when to demand human review, and the communication skills to explain that reasoning.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with agent frameworks and protocols such as MCP, A2A, Anthropic or OpenAI APIs, Bedrock, Vertex, or LangGraph.
  • Experience building developer platforms, orchestration systems, or SDLC tooling, including Jira, GitHub, or ServiceNow integration.
  • Knowledge-engineering experience: retrieval systems, embeddings, or enterprise knowledge graphs.
  • Experience taking AI features through security, privacy, and responsible AI review in an enterprise.
  • Evidence of craft: open-source contributions, technical writing, or internal platforms with devoted users.

Core Competencies

  • Agent Engineering: LLM application architecture; prompt and context engineering; tool use and orchestration; multi-agent design.
  • Evals and Trust: Eval design and automation; guardrails and human-in-the-loop gates; AI observability; responsible AI governance.
  • Platform Craft: API and event-driven design; CI/CD and automation; cloud-native engineering; enterprise integration.
  • Judgment and Impact: Systems thinking; pragmatic risk-taking; mentoring and standards-setting; clear communication.

Why This Role

Incubation is a durable capability, not a project team: the team persists, and the product rotates. Agentic delivery is product one; the next incubation bets follow. You will help define how AI-first engineering works at Equinix, with the autonomy of a startup and the reach of a global platform company. Few roles let you change how an entire organization builds software. This one exists to do exactly that.

Staff / Senior Staff Engineer, AI Agent Engineering in London employer: Equinix, Inc.

Equinix, Inc. is an exceptional employer that values its employees by fostering a collaborative and innovative work culture in Slough, UK. With a strong emphasis on professional development, employees are encouraged to grow their skills through ongoing training and support, while enjoying competitive benefits and a commitment to work-life balance. Joining Equinix means being part of a forward-thinking team dedicated to maintaining the highest standards in data centre reliability.

Equinix, Inc.

Contact Details:

Equinix, Inc. Recruitment Team

StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫

We think this is how you could land Staff / Senior Staff Engineer, AI Agent Engineering in London

Join Local Tech Meetups

Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at Equinix, Inc. or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!

Contribute to Open Source Projects

Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to Equinix, Inc..

Tap into Online Developer Communities

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We think you need these skills to ace Staff / Senior Staff Engineer, AI Agent Engineering in London

LLM-powered application development
Prompt and context engineering
Tool calling
Multi-agent workflows
Evaluation design for AI systems
Test engineering instincts
Proficiency in Python

Some tips for your application 🫡

Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.

Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Equinix, Inc..

Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Equinix, Inc. and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!

Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!

How to prepare for a job interview at Equinix, Inc.

Brush Up on Your Coding Skills

For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.

Know Your Tools and Frameworks

Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Equinix, Inc. uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.

Showcase Your Projects

Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.

Prepare for Behavioural Questions

While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.