S

Sekai

Generative AI-powered platform for interactive storytelling

AI Agent Engineer - Coding Agent

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/23/2026
No salary listed
Mid
San Francisco, CA, USA
RemoteRemote-first; the role is remote.
Software EngineeringAI Application Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • Experience building agentic systems involving tool use, orchestration, retry and repair loops, and context management, using provider APIs or agent frameworks such as LangGraph, PydanticAI, Google ADK, Pi-mono, or Vercel AI SDK.
  • Understanding of agent-framework tradeoffs and when frameworks impede the work.
  • Experience with distributed or real-time systems.
  • A research-and-ship mindset, with experience treating open-ended problems as experiments and delivering results to production.
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and depth in Python and/or TypeScript.
  • A track record of shipping and operating production systems.
  • Experience owning complex problems end to end and demonstrating the systems built and their outcomes.
  • Strong product instincts and ability to translate user-experience goals into system-design decisions.
Responsibilities
  • Design and own the agent harness layer.
  • Build long-horizon agentic workflows with maximal autonomy.
  • Develop evaluation and quality loops, including evaluation harnesses, regression testing, and failure taxonomies.
  • Design model strategy for routing, benchmarking, reliability, and cost and latency optimization.
  • Create debuggable agent systems with tracing, metrics, alerts, and observability.
  • Research novel approaches and ship them to production.
Desired Qualifications
  • Experience taking a customer-facing product from zero to one.
  • Experience building a coding agent, developer tool, IDE assistant, or code-generation pipeline.
  • Experience building evaluation frameworks such as automated scoring, regression suites, and release gating.
  • Experience designing Model Context Protocol (MCP)-style tool protocols or robust tool interfaces for large language model systems.
  • Experience training and/or fine-tuning large language models.

About the company

Sekai is a generative AI-powered social entertainment platform that lets users create, share, and experience interactive anime-style stories. Users design characters, generate AI-driven narratives, and roleplay as different personas, with features like voice cloning and image-to-avatar conversion built into a social sharing experience. The app uses a free-to-use model with minimal ads and may add premium enterprise services such as analytics later. Backed by firms like a16z, Mayfield, and A*, with founders who previously worked on TikTok, its goal is to grow a user-centric community around AI-assisted storytelling.

Company Size

11-50

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$20M

Headquarters

Sunnyvale, California

Founded

2023

Get referred to Sekai

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Sekai raised $26 million in June 2026 from Khosla, Connect, and Mayfield.
  • Users built 15 million mini-apps, with 200,000 new apps created daily.
  • Axios reported hour-plus daily usage and planned creator monetization through fan experiences.

What critics are saying

  • OpenAI, Roblox, and ByteDance can copy prompt-to-app workflows within months.
  • User-generated mini-apps create moderation, copyright, and safety liabilities that trigger app-store scrutiny.
  • Sekai still depends on virality; weak retention breaks the consumer platform entirely.

What makes Sekai unique

  • Lucky Zhang and Arthur Cheung bring Apple, ByteDance, and TikTok operating experience.
  • Sekai turns prompts into mini-apps, collapsing creation into seconds for non-coders.
  • CAA-linked creator partnerships differentiate distribution beyond generic AI app builders.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Remote Work Options
  • Company Equity

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

22%

1 year growth

13%

2 year growth

-5%
Axios
Jun 1st, 2026
Sekai raises $20M to build AI-powered app creation platform

Sekai has raised $20 million in a Series A round to expand its platform for creating mini applications through text prompts, founder and CEO Lucky Zhang told Axios. Zhang, who previously sold startups to Apple and TikTok parent ByteDance, believes AI-generated software will become the next major consumer application category. The funding will support the growth of Sekai's platform, which enables users to build applications using natural language inputs.

Yahoo Finance
Jun 1st, 2026
Exclusive: Sekai raises $20M for AI app creation

Sekai has raised a $20 million Series A to grow a platform for creating mini apps through text prompts, founder and CEO Lucky Zhang exclusively tells Axios.

a16z
Nov 21st, 2025
a16z speedrun

We invest up to $1M in your new startup.