Strategist, Agent Development - Public Sector

Location: San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Washington, D.C. Workplace: OnSite ABOUT US Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. ABOUT THE PUBLIC SECTOR TEAM - Sierra recently received FedRAMP High certification, enabling us to bring our industry-leading technology to partners in the US public sector. We’re now building our founding public sector team to redefine the relationship between the government and its citizenry. - Today, our agents already enable citizens to access social services, report fraud, and understand complex government systems. Simultaneously, they empower government officials to better hear the concerns and inquiries of their constituencies. - We are explicitly nonpartisan and committed to empowering public servants to leverage AI to advance their important missions. - In our journey, we are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. WHAT YOU’LL DO As an Agent Strategist, you own how Sierra’s AI agents come to life for our customers — from first pilot to a production agent handling thousands of conversations a day. You sit at the intersection of product, building agents and customer-facing work, and stay just as close to the technology as you are to the people you build for. You transform a customer’s thorniest, highest-stakes problems into agents that measurably move their business. - Own the Agent Development Life Cycle https://sierra.ai/blog/agent-development-life-cycle. Take agents from initial scope through conversation design, tooling, evaluation, launch, and continuous iteration in production. Translate mission goals, policy requirements, and operational workflows into an agent that performs reliably in the real world. - Be a trusted strategic advisor to public sector leaders. Work shoulder-to-shoulder with agency executives and program leaders to define success, prioritize opportunities, and shape an AI strategy grounded in mission impact. - Partner with working teams day to day. Run working sessions with program, operations, technology, security, legal, and procurement stakeholders; resolve issues as they arise; and make the decisions that keep deployments moving toward launch. - Identify new ways to expand our impact. Understand our partners' most urgent needs and develop roadmaps for new use cases, including proactive outreach, multilingual access, and long-horizon agents that can support people across multi-step journeys. - Directly shape the product and our public sector strategy. Surface unmet needs from customer work, prototype new approaches, and partner with research, product, platform, and public sector leadership to influence Sierra's roadmap, market strategy, and repeatable solutions for government. EXAMPLE PROJECTS These are the kinds of projects that strategists on our public sector team have worked on recently: - Improve access to benefits and services. Launch an agent that helps residents understand eligibility, gather the right information, and navigate a complex application or recertification process across channels and languages. - Modernize constituent support. Design an agent that answers policy and program questions, provides case or application status, and routes sensitive or exceptional situations to the right public servant with full context. - Make critical reporting easier and safer. Build trusted conversational experiences for reporting fraud, safety concerns, or other high-stakes issues while meeting rigorous privacy, security, accessibility, and auditability requirements. - Enable proactive government services. Create a roadmap for outbound agents that remind people about deadlines, explain program changes, or help them complete important next steps before a benefit or service is interrupted. - Build repeatable public sector capabilities. Use a live agency deployment as a design partnership to shape new platform capabilities, evaluation standards, or implementation patterns that can serve institutions across federal, state, and local government. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - Ownership and delivery. A track record of leading multiple complex, high-visibility initiatives and driving cross-functional teams from an ambiguous starting point to measurable outcomes - for example as part of an early team, consultancy, or otherwise.. - Technical aptitude. Comfort engaging directly with technical concepts, including reading API documentation, understanding data models and system architecture, and following engineering and security tradeoffs in design discussions. - Commitment to public service. A passion for public sector work and a belief in the potential of institutions to improve outcomes for the people and communities they serve. - Communication. Clear, direct, and persuasive communication across executive, operational, policy, and technical audiences, with the ability to turn complexity into shared decisions. - Strategic problem-solving in ambiguity. Strong analytical and critical-thinking skills to break down complex problems, spot risks early, and adapt as policy, stakeholder, or implementation conditions change. EVEN BETTER... - Experience building or deploying AI/LLM agents in production — hands-on with the tools behind them (eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG, prompt engineering) — working closely with technical counterparts. - Experience working in or with federal, state, or local government, including familiarity with procurement, security and compliance, accessibility, policy implementation, or systems integration. - You’ve been a founder, founding team member, or operator — you know how to balance craft, ownership, and speed. - A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience — and/or an MBA or comparable experience at the intersection of technology and business. OUR VALUES - Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work. - Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it. - Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve. - Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time. - Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements. WHAT WE OFFER We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees: - Flexible (unlimited) paid time off - Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family - Life insurance and disability benefits - Retirement plan dependent on country of employment - Parental leave - Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot - Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized  - Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most - Free alphorn lessons These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies. BE YOU, WITH US We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.