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APX, New Grad

Sierra

Sierra

San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Nov 12, 2024

About Us:

  • At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build their own autonomous AI agents for everything from customer service to commerce. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco.

  • We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Competitive Intensity, and Family. 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 and Clay Bavor. Bret was most recently co-CEO of Salesforce, which had previously acquired the company he founded, Quip. Before founding Quip, Bret was the CTO of Facebook. Bret was one of Google's earliest product managers and one of the co-creators of Google Maps. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. 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.

Program Overview

APX is Sierra’s rotational program to develop the next generation of AI builders.

In the age of AI, we believe generalists with diverse training and experience will become more important and empowered than ever. Instead of specializing early in an engineering, product management, or business subfield, the next generation of AI leaders will be able to do everything it takes to create, ship, and distribute great products.

As an APX, you’ll be among the first to live in this exciting future. You’ll build AI agents directly with top global brands and gain access to comprehensive training opportunities, both as an Agent Engineer and Agent Product Manager. If you’re hungry to shape and learn from the most important technological wave of our lifetimes, come build at Sierra.

What You’ll Do

The APX program is 18-months long and consists of two core rotations. After 2 intensive weeks of “Agent Bootcamp,” you’ll spend 9 months as an Agent Engineer and 9 months as an Agent PM. As you learn how we build AI agents at Sierra, you’ll be committing code and designing new features every day. We move quickly at Sierra, and you’ll build multiple customer agents from inception to launch and beyond during each rotation.

  • Agent Engineering: During your Agent Engineering rotation, you’ll become an expert in building AI agents, delivering production agents for Sierra’s customers as an Agent Engineer. As your agents handle and resolve millions of end-user conversations, you’ll develop a strong foundation in AI engineering and product design.

  • Agent Product Management: As an Agent PM, you’ll work closely with our customers to design new agents from scratch and optimize existing agents as a Product Manager. You’ll represent Sierra externally with partners and prospects and build a broad intuition for customer success and impactful opportunities within Sierra.

Graduation

After completing the final rotation, we expect graduates of the APX program to be ready to take on more senior roles in a field they’ve practiced. You’ll put everything together—your AI engineering expertise, product sense, and customer learnings—to lead agent development for customers as an Agent Engineer or Agent PM. We'll strongly consider your preference as well as current business needs.

Leadership Development

As an APX, you will have boundless access to learning and growth opportunities during and after the program. You will directly represent your agents with customers and prospects and in regular business reviews with our founders and senior leadership team. You’ll collaborate across the company at all stages of the program, working closely with other PMs, engineers, designers, AI researchers, and executive sponsors.

You will also have access to leadership and pitch coaching resources, and you will travel together as a team to meet Sierra customers, attend talks, research future AI opportunities, and learn from industry leaders. You will also attend a monthly speaker series with AI leaders and researchers from Sierra and the industry. Each APX will be paired with an APX mentor throughout the program. Typically, mentors are among the first handful of Agent Engineers and PMs at Sierra.

These support structures are in addition to functional management, project teams, and all of the other benefits offered to Sierra employees at large.

Preferred Qualifications

The APX program is open to students graduating in 2025.

  • Pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree (or comparable program) in computer science or a related field.

  • Professional experience in software engineering or product management, especially with customer-facing responsibilities.

  • Expertise in React, TypeScript, Python, Go, and other modern programming languages.

  • Demonstrated curiosity and interest in AI applications (e.g., research, jobs, side projects).

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

  • 401(k) Plan with Sierra match

  • 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 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.