As a Lead AI Engineer, you will build an AI harness for supplier agents, manage context, design sub-agent patterns, and debug production behaviors, collaborating with a senior engineer on architecture.
Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry-leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. We empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.
Why join Coupa?
🔹 Pioneering Technology: At Coupa, we're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging the latest technology to empower our customers with greater efficiency and visibility in their spend.
🔹 Collaborative Culture: We value collaboration and teamwork, and our culture is driven by transparency, openness, and a shared commitment to excellence.
🔹 Global Impact: Join a company where your work has a global, measurable impact on our clients, the business, and each other.
Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.
What You'll Do:
- Build and extend the eval pipeline: how we measure task completion, catch regressions, and turn production failures into fixed behaviors.
- Work on context management: what the agent sees, when, and how we keep long-horizon tasks coherent without burning tokens.
- Design sub-agent patterns: when to fan out, how to compose specialized agents cleanly, and how to keep the parent agent in control of the outcome.
- Own document parsing: turning supplier-uploaded invoices, catalogs, and contracts into structured context the agent can reason over.
- Wrap Coupa supplier APIs as agent-callable CLI tools, with clean error surfaces and sensible defaults for an agent caller.
- Ship supplier-facing skills on top of the harness: the procedural instructions and tool compositions that let the agent handle specific tasks end-to-end.
- Debug messy production behavior: why did the agent take that path, where did it get confused, and what tool, context, or harness change fixes it?
- Partner with the senior engineer on harness architecture calls as you find gaps while working across the stack.
What You Will Bring to Coupa:
- Have 3–5 years shipping production software and are strong in Python (TypeScript a plus).
- Have shipped at least one LLM-powered feature or product, even if small, and can talk about what went wrong and what you'd do differently.
- Are a daily, heavy user of agentic coding tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalents.
- Have side projects. Real ones. Things you've built because you couldn't stop thinking about them. Ideally things the new generation of AI tools made possible for you to finish.
- Write and speak English fluently. Skill authoring is prose-heavy and the team operates in English.
- Debug by reading, not by guessing. You reach for logs, traces, and evals before theorizing.
Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.
Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.
By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa’s Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.
Coupa Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
350 N. Orleans St, Chicago, IL, United States, 60654
Similar Jobs at Coupa
Artificial Intelligence • Fintech • Information Technology • Logistics • Payments • Business Intelligence • Generative AI
Lead vision, strategy, and execution for AI-powered features in Coupa's Supplier Network. Drive two-sided marketplace growth, monetization, trust/identity, and product-led growth by partnering with engineering, AI/ML, data science, and commercial teams. Define success metrics, engage customers, and monitor AI and marketplace trends to increase liquidity, revenue, and platform differentiation.
Top Skills:
Ai/MlAPIsData ScienceGenerative Ai
Artificial Intelligence • Fintech • Information Technology • Logistics • Payments • Business Intelligence • Generative AI
As a Sr. Lead AI Engineer, you will develop the agent harness for supplier agents, focusing on platform design and cloud infrastructure deployment while collaborating with product and engineering teams.
Top Skills:
Cloud InfrastructureContainerizationPythonTypescript
Artificial Intelligence • Fintech • Information Technology • Logistics • Payments • Business Intelligence • Generative AI
Lead end-to-end customer engagement delivery, manage implementation projects, oversee financial performance, and build relationships with stakeholders.
Top Skills:
NetSuiteOracleSaaSSalesforceSAPWorkday
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
