AI Engineer

Build production-grade AI for real-world operations at Caterpillar. This on-site AI Engineer role in East Peoria, IL or Irving, TX focuses on designing and optimizing LLM-powered systems, including RAG pipelines and autonomous agent workflows, with rigorous testing, evaluation, and observability to support safe, reliable, and deterministic AI behavior. The position offers a salary range of $97,530 - $158,480 per year and includes comprehensive benefits for both full-time and part-time employees.

What you will do

• Architect, version, and refine system, contextual, and dynamic prompt strategies using approaches such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts, ReAct, and Few-Shot learning.
• Reduce hallucinations, jailbreaking, and prompt injection risk using programmatic guardrails and adversarial prompting techniques.
• Adapt, benchmark, and fine-tune prompt structures across diverse open-source and proprietary frontier models.
• Design and orchestrate multi-agent systems and multi-step reasoning workflows with frameworks such as LangGraph and LangChain.
• Integrate and fine-tune Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), covering semantic search, chunking strategies, embedding models, and vector database query workflows.
• Create precise function-calling and tool-use prompting so LLMs can reliably interact with external APIs, databases, and legacy codebases.
• Build automated evaluation and testing using RAGAS and Evals to validate RAG accuracy and support continuous benchmarking across datasets and models.
• Implement regression testing plus CI/CD pipelines to confirm prompt stability, agent trajectory correctness, and tool-calling accuracy.
• Set up production monitoring and observability with tools including Azure Application insights and Microsoft Foundry.
• Track and optimize runtime metrics such as semantic drift, token usage, cost efficiency, and end-to-end latency.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Software Engineers to translate commercial requirements into deterministic AI capabilities.
• Keep up with rapid changes in LLM capabilities, evaluation frameworks, and orchestration libraries.

What you bring

• Expert-level mastery of structured prompt formats (including XML and JSON wrappers), system-level steering, and context-window optimization.
• Strong proficiency in Python or TypeScript for backend AI logic, asynchronous data processing, and API integration.
• Hands-on experience building applications using LangChain, LangGraph, and native SDKs.
• Solid experience with vector databases such as Azure AI Search and AWS Open Search, including hybrid search retrieval.
• Strong data skills using Pandas and NumPy, including data cleaning and token handling, plus foundational understanding of NLP transformers.
• Experience implementing Application Insights, OpenLLMetry, or custom evaluation and guardrail layers.
• Knowledge of deep learning architectures, fine-tuning frameworks such as QLoRA and PEFT, and platforms like Hugging Face, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.
• Experience deploying containerized AI microservices with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms including AWS or GCP.
• 2+ years of dedicated professional experience developing production software integrated with GenAI/LLM pipelines.
• A bachelor’s or master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, or Mathematics (or a highly technical discipline).
• A proven portfolio showing successfully deployed RAG systems or operational AI agents in commercial environments.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)
• 401(k) savings plans
• Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)
• Health Lifestyle Programs
• Employee Assistance Program
• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts
• Career Development
• Incentive bonus
• Disability benefits
• Life Insurance
• Parental leave
• Adoption benefits
• Tuition Reimbursement
• These benefits also apply to part-time employees

Role details

• Location: East Peoria, IL or Irving, TX (onsite)
• Work schedule: Onsite five days a week
• Visa Sponsorship: Not available
• Posting dates: October 27, 2026 - November 8, 2026
• Salary pay range: $97,530.00 - $158,480.00
• Career area: Technology, Digital and Data