Lead AI Software Engineer

Liberty Personnel Services, Inc. (LP86342) is partnering with a Wilmington, Delaware employer to recruit a senior AI software engineer for a hybrid role. The position offers a salary range of $150,000 to $165,000 per year and the opportunity to own the full lifecycle of production-grade AI systems, from prototype to deployment. You will build LLM powered applications, internal copilots, workflow automations, and intelligent agents that drive tangible business outcomes, while operating in a collaborative, results-focused environment.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy applications powered by large language models (LLMs).
• Deliver internal copilots, workflow automation capabilities, and intelligent agents to support teams.
• Advance solutions from proof of concept to stable, SLA-backed production services.
• Design with observability, rollback, and resilience in mind from day one.
• Own retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems.
• Architect ingestion, chunking, embedding, indexing, and hybrid retrieval pipelines.
• Implement reranking strategies and evaluation methods for retrieval quality.
• Continuously measure and improve retrieval performance using structured offline and online metrics.
• Design scalable AI infrastructure and secure architectures in AWS.
• Implement identity controls, secrets management, and usage governance for AI workloads.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and establish reusable patterns for AI workloads.
• Establish observability and reliability for AI systems through tracing, logging, and version tracking of prompts and agents.
• Create evaluation dashboards, regression alerts, and canary testing strategies.
• Develop testing frameworks that address non-deterministic AI behavior.
• Implement guardrails and governance controls to protect data and outputs.
• Enforce PII protections, access controls, audit logging, and review workflows; build safeguards to manage hallucination risk and policy violations.
• Drive cost and performance optimization by reducing latency and increasing throughput via batching, caching, routing, and scaling.
• Establish unit economics for AI initiatives and continually reduce run-rate model costs.
• Enable other engineers by creating reusable templates, SDKs, and abstractions to accelerate safe AI development.
• Raise engineering standards and best practices for AI across teams.
• Operate what you build by participating in on-call rotations, authoring runbooks, and eliminating single points of failure.
• Maintain the same level of operational rigor for AI systems as for modern production services.

Requirements

• 5 to 10 years of professional software engineering experience.
• 2+ years building and deploying AI or LLM applications in production environments.
• Strong Python proficiency and solid backend engineering fundamentals.
• Experience designing and tuning RAG systems, including embeddings, hybrid search, reranking, and vector databases.
• Familiarity with both commercial and open source model providers and multi-step orchestration.
• Experience with CI/CD, containers, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), and production operations.
• Hands-on experience with observability, tracing, and monitoring tools.
• Focus on cost efficiency, quality, and risk management in AI systems.
• Ability to collaborate cross-functionally and mentor other engineers.

Technologies

• Python
• AWS
• Vector databases
• CI/CD
• Containers

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning or distilling models.
• Familiarity with orchestration platforms for ML or data workflows.
• Exposure to container orchestration or high-performance API frameworks.
• Experience integrating structured and warehouse-based data sources into retrieval systems.