Agent Strategist: Your PhD in applied AI

If you’re business savvy with product chops, you’ve likely faced this career dilemma: build the system, or be close to the customer. Rarely both — until now.

What changed?

Before AI, turning ideas into software required a lot of coordination and engineering overhead. Now, tools like Ghostwriter, our agent for building agents, make it possible for one person to take an idea from concept to production — with fewer handoffs, faster execution, and greater accountability for the outcome.

Meet the Agent Strategist. Last year, this role barely existed. Today, it’s our fastest-growing team.

The AI all-rounder

It takes skill to build a great AI agent — one that can solve complex problems in a large enterprise.

The role of Agent Strategist is quite technical: you need to know what will work and how to build and integrate it within a company’s existing systems. You’re also embedded within their organization — responsible for driving outcomes — so business acumen is key.

You need to prioritize between competing goals, understand a company’s products, services and workflows at a deep level, wrangle different teams to launch early and iterate from there, move the metrics that matter, and imagine future use cases.

It’s a role that combines go-to-market, consulting, and building in one. Agent Strategists thrive on the variety — going deep on a technical issue one moment, zooming out into change management another — and the impact that comes from building agents that are used by millions of people every day.

Get to ground truth

Agent Strategists lead deployments end-to-end, partnering with everyone from C-suite executives to the customer experience, product, engineering, marketing and operations teams.

Keeping the work on track — from early scoping to production, and from production to impact — takes hustle and judgment. Deciding what matters now versus later. Pushing back on scope creep. Getting teams comfortable with non-deterministic software that’s constantly evolving. Knowing when an agent is good enough to launch so teams can get real feedback quickly.

• Global travel company — over 20 internal stakeholders and no APIs; our agent strategist helped separate signal from the noise, set clear goals, build an actionable plan, prioritize the important and urgent, and launch.
• Leading healthcare company — big picture AI transformation goal with few specifics; our agent strategist helped focus everyone on getting an agent into production fast. Now they’re expanding into the next set of use cases — ones that will eventually handle millions of conversations across every patient touchpoint that matters.

Design and build agents

Agent Strategists are builders to their core. You take real customer journeys — where is my order, first notice of loss, return merchandise authorization — and turn them into working agents.

It’s about mapping the workflow, collecting the right information (standard operating procedures, call transcripts, process documentation, audio calls), designing the agent’s behavior, and testing and refining it continuously.

This takes craftsmanship.

Some days, you’re rewriting prompts or running hundreds of simulations. Other days, you’re restructuring a flow based on the insights gained from the agent or refining its tone to better reflect the brand. And because the tools are evolving fast, you’re constantly experimenting — figuring out what AI can do, where it breaks, and how to push it even further.

• Global hardware manufacturer — urgent need to expand to 16+ languages; our agent strategist worked through edge cases like serial number capture, and transcription and pronunciation challenges to go live in under 2 months.
• Global tech company — deeply technical enterprise with an extremely high quality bar; our agent strategist worked with their engineers deep in the code on a voice agent for their main support channel, which is now handling 100,000 calls a day, and growing.

Drive outcomes

Ultimately, outcomes are what matter. With agents, it’s no longer enough to deploy them and drive usage — success is measured in higher CSAT, resolved conversations, saved cancellations, revenue generated, and a stronger brand.

That’s why at Sierra, we price based on outcomes. We only get paid when the agent delivers real results, which means our incentives — and the work of the agent strategist — are fully aligned with the customer’s success. This requires focus, a clear understanding of the underlying business metrics and how to measure them, and the resilience to keep improving the agent over time.

• Large services company — planned for a multi-month rollout; in the face of a major storm, our agent strategist helped them deploy the first agent in under 48 hours; it handled critical customer requests at scale, without the need for additional staff.
• Global delivery platform — launched ahead of schedule with complex use cases; our agent strategist focused on constant iteration, increasing resolution rates by ~30%.

Shape what Sierra builds

Because they are so close to the work, agent strategists are often the first to spot opportunities to improve or expand our platform.

So you’re not just building for customers. You’re helping Sierra build — turning fixes that work in one context to solutions that can work much more broadly.

• Explorer — one strategist became an early power user, and her feedback has shaped how the product evolved, and how the broader team uses it.
• Abuse detection — one strategist was red teaming for a large tech company, systematically probing agents for unsafe, off-policy, or unintended behavior before launch. That experience enabled them to build customizable guardrails — one of many defense layers that underpin agents built on Sierra.

Come build with us

Like our day-to-day, our backgrounds are quite diverse. We’re product managers, engineers, consultants, and more.

What we share is a desire to stay close to both the customer and the technology, and a belief that the best way to learn AI is by working on real agents, in the real world.

If that sounds exciting — and you want to work in a low-ego, high-intensity culture with unreasonable agency — we’re hiring.