Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer

Remote

Rate

$85/hour

Client

confidential

Mandatory Skill

Agentic AI; Generative AI; LLMs; LangChain

We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design, build, deploy, and operate enterprise-grade Large Language Model (LLM) applications supporting business processes within a regulated financial services environment.

The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience taking Generative AI solutions from design through production deployment and providing ongoing production support. This role requires deep expertise in LLM orchestration, RAG, AI evaluation, Python, cloud services, observability, and production-grade AI engineering.

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Key Responsibilities

Design and implement multi-step LLM pipelines, including

o LLM orchestration

o Structured output generation

o Tool/function calling

o Error handling, retry, and fallback logic

• Develop and maintain

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions, including

o Indexing strategies

o Embedding model selection

o Retrieval quality optimization

• Build and maintain LLM evaluation frameworks and golden datasets to measure accuracy, consistency, and regression risk before production releases.
• Establish and enforce quality gates for model, prompt, and configuration changes.
• Implement observability for non-deterministic

AI applications, including

o Tracing

o Structured logging

o Quality monitoring

o Cost monitoring

• Manage cost and latency performance of production AI workloads against defined budgets.
• Partner with Product, Business, Risk, Compliance, and Security teams to translate business requirements into technical solutions and support review/approval processes.
• Participate in code reviews, architectural decisions, and technical documentation.
• Provide ongoing production support for deployed AI applications, including incident response, root-cause analysis, regression management, and remediation.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to engineering standards and best practices.

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Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Minimum 2 years of experience developing LLM/Generative AI applications.
• Demonstrated experience deploying at least one enterprise-grade AI application into production and supporting it after launch.

Enterprise Production AI Experience Must Include

• AI solution serving real users or business processes, rather than only a proof of concept or internal pilot.

Accountability for non-functional requirements such as

o Availability

o Latency

o Cost management

o Access control

o Data handling

o Auditability

• Experience completing security and compliance reviews within a regulated or enterprise environment.

Post-production ownership involving

o Incident response

o Regression management

o Changes deployed against live traffic

Technical Requirements

• Hands-on experience with at least one

LLM agent/orchestration framework, such as

o LangGraph

o LangChain

o LlamaIndex

o Semantic Kernel

o AutoGen

o Amazon Bedrock Agents

Strong experience with LLM evaluation methodologies, including

o Dataset/golden dataset curation

o Metric selection

o Evaluation of non-deterministic outputs

o Appropriate use of LLM-as-judge techniques

o Established evaluation frameworks or custom evaluation harnesses

• Strong proficiency in Python 3.

11+, including

o Type annotations

o Automated testing

o Asynchronous programming

Experience building and operating cloud-based services such as

o REST APIs

o Data pipelines

o Event-driven workers

• Experience working within codebases governed by automated quality gates and formal code reviews.

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Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Document AI / Intelligent Document Processing, including:

o OCR

o Structured field extraction

o Scanned documents

o Photographed documents

o Handwritten source material

Experience designing human-in-the-loop workflows, including

o Confidence scoring

o Selective automation

o Escalation and review processes

• Experience implementing business rules or policies as versioned and reviewable artifacts.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, particularly Apache Kafka.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD pipeline ownership.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform.

Experience with

o Model selection

o Model benchmarking

o Fine-tuning

o Distillation

o Cost and quality optimization

• Prior experience within financial services, insurance, healthcare, or another regulated industry.

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Technical Environment

AI / GenAI

• LLMs
• LLM orchestration frameworks
• RAG
• Agentic AI
• LLM evaluation and observability tooling

Programming / Application Development

• Python 3.11+
• FastAPI
• Pydantic

Data / Database

• PostgreSQL with vector extensions
• Aurora PostgreSQL

Cloud / AI Platform

• AgentCore

Infrastructure / DevOps

• Kubernetes
• Helm
• Terraform
• CI/CD

Event-Driven Architecture

• Apache Kafka

Observability

• Datadog
• OpenTelemetry

Key Must-Have Skills for Screening

Python 3.11+ | LLM/GenAI | RAG | LangGraph/LangChain/LlamaIndex/Semantic Kernel/AutoGen/Bedrock Agents | LLM Evaluation | Production AI Deployment & Support | Cloud Services/APIs | AI Observability | Enterprise Security/Compliance

Most important screening point

The candidate should have actually deployed an enterprise-grade GenAI/LLM application to production and supported it post-launch. POC-only GenAI experience would not meet the stated requirement.