https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/collectwise/jobs/ZunnO6k-ai-agent-engineer

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[1792694f60]

CollectWise

Automating consumer debt collection with AI

AI Agent Engineer

$150K - $200K*0.25% - 1.00%*New York, NY, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Engineering, Backend
Experience
1+ years
Visa
US citizen/visa only
Connect directly with founders of the best YC-funded startups.
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Sean OBrien
Sean OBrien
Founder
Sean OBrien
Sean OBrien
Founder

About the role

About Us

CollectWise is a fast growing and well funded Y Combinator-backed
startup. We're using generative AI to automate debt collection, a
$35B market in the US alone. Our AI agents are already outperforming
human collectors by 2X, and we're doing so at a fraction of the cost.

With a team of three, we scaled to a $1 million annualized run rate
in just a few months, and we are now hiring an AI Agent Engineer to
help us reach $10 million within the next year.

Role

We are hiring an AI Agent Engineer to design, optimize, and
productionize the prompting and conversation logic behind our voice
AI agents, while also supporting the technical systems that power
customer deployments.

You'll work at the intersection of AI quality, product outcomes, and
engineering execution--owning prompt development, testing, and
iteration loops that improve real-world performance (e.g., identity
verification, payment conversion, dispute handling, containment
rates), while collaborating closely with the founder and customers to
ship improvements quickly.

This role is ideal if you're highly analytical and business minded,
love experimentation and measurement, and can also jump into back-end
code and integrations when needed.

Responsibilities

  * Own the end-to-end prompting strategy for CollectWise voice
    agents, including conversation flows, tone, compliance-safe
    phrasing, and edge-case handling.
  * Build and maintain a testing and evaluation framework for voice
    agent performance (A/B tests, regression tests, conversation QA,
    KPI reporting).
  * Iterate quickly based on performance data and customer feedback
    to improve outcomes like containment, conversion, liquidation
    rates, and customer satisfaction.
  * Configure and productionize AI agents for each client (prompts,
    workflows, data transfers), ensuring reliable behavior in
    production.
  * Implement prompt-related tooling and infrastructure (versioning,
    rollout strategies, safety checks, monitoring).
  * Contribute to client implementations as needed by building or
    supporting integrations and back-end systems.

Desired Qualifications

  * 2+ years of experience in voice AI and/or prompt engineering (LLM
    prompting, agent design, conversational systems, speech
    workflows, etc.).
  * Highly analytical and business minded--comfortable tying work
    directly to measurable outcomes and ROI.
  * Strong technical background with experience in modern back-end
    frameworks (e.g., Node.js) and production systems.
  * Experience with AWS and SQL.
  * Experience building products in a production environment
    (early-stage startup experience, your own startup, or a
    meaningful end-to-end project).
  * Excellent communication skills and strong work ethic.
  * Experience with GPT-5 or other LLMs.

Compensation

  * Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000, based on relevant experience
    and qualifications.
  * 0.25% to 1% equity compensation

About CollectWise

CollectWise is revolutionizing debt recovery with autonomous AI
agents and an integrated legal network. We boost recovery rates,
reduce costs, and maintain a positive brand image through respectful,
data-driven interactions.

CollectWise
CollectWise
Founded:2024
Batch:F24
Team Size:8
Status:
Active
 
Founders
Sean OBrien
Sean OBrien
 
 
Founder
Sean OBrien
Sean OBrien
 
 
Founder

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