Agent builder
Also known as: AI agent developer, agentic AI developer
As agents shifted from research demos to production reality in 2024 and 2025, organizations started formalizing the work of building them. Walmart's chief people officer noted publicly in early 2026 that all agent builder roles had been filled internally by both technical and non-technical employees. The job involves more than coding: it requires deciding which tasks an agent should own, how to constrain its behavior, how to handle failure states, and how to give it enough context to operate reliably.
An agent builder's toolkit typically includes an agent framework or orchestration layer, tool definitions that the agent can call (APIs, code execution, search), memory systems for persisting information across sessions, and evaluation pipelines for testing behavior. The work is closer to system design than to traditional software development, because the primary output is a set of behaviors and constraints rather than deterministic code.
The role is still taking shape. Some agent builders come from software engineering backgrounds and extend their skills toward AI orchestration. Others come from product or operations backgrounds and lean on visual agent building tools and no-code configuration. The common thread is a comfort with systems that don't do exactly the same thing twice, and the judgment to know when that variability is acceptable and when it is not.