AI Agent Engineer skills & stack

The skills and tools employers expect from a AI Agent Engineer, plus what each level is expected to own.

Core skills

Typical stack & tools

What you'll actually do

• •Design tool-use interfaces and function-calling schemas that let agents act on real systems
• •Build planning/reasoning loops (ReAct, plan-and-execute) and short- and long-term memory
• •Write and maintain eval suites that catch regressions in non-deterministic behavior
• •Integrate retrieval (RAG) and external APIs/MCP servers as agent capabilities
• •Harden agents for production: retries, guardrails, cost and latency budgets

Skills by level

Junior

Ships well-scoped tools and prompts under guidance; writes evals for a single agent.

Mid

Owns an agent end-to-end: tool design, memory, evals, and production reliability.

Senior

Designs multi-step agent systems, sets eval standards, mentors, and drives reliability.

Staff+

Defines agent patterns across teams; bridges into architecture and platform decisions.