Senior AI Engineer

Contract role for an Agentic AI and Machine Learning Engineer to build secure, reliable agentic AI systems for production diagnostics, automation, and remediation.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement tool-calling agents combining retrieval, structured reasoning, and secure action execution using Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Develop function calling flows, change orchestration, policy enforcement, and least-privilege access controls for agent actions.
• Create evaluation frameworks for open-source and foundation LLMs, including prompt synthesis, response validation, and self-correction loops.
• Integrate agents with observability, incident management, and deployment systems to support automated diagnostics, runbook execution, remediation, and post-incident summaries with full traceability.
• Work with production engineers and application teams to define agentic AI roadmaps and measurable objectives tied to reliability, risk reduction, and cost.
• Implement validator models, adversarial prompt handling, policy checks, deterministic fallbacks, circuit breakers, and rollback strategies.
• Build RAG pipelines, curate domain knowledge, validate data quality, and set feedback loops and milestones to keep knowledge fresh.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software development experience in one or more languages, including Python, C/C++, Go, or Java.
• 3+ years designing, architecting, testing, and launching production ML systems, including model deployment and serving, evaluation, monitoring, data processing pipelines, and fine-tuning workflows.
• Practical LLM experience with API integration, prompt engineering, fine-tuning or adaptation, and applications using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and tool-using agents.
• Experience with vector retrieval, function calling, and secure tool execution.
• Knowledge of commercial and open-source LLMs, including OpenAI, Gemini, Llama, Qwen, and Claude.
• Solid understanding of applied statistics, core ML concepts and algorithms, and data structures.
• Strong analytical problem-solving skills with ownership and urgency, focused on measurable business impact.
• Ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and collaborate effectively across global teams.

Technologies

• Python, C/C++, Go, Java
• Machine learning (ML) systems
• LLMs, API integration, prompt engineering, fine-tuning
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-using agents
• Vector retrieval, function calling
• OpenAI, Gemini, Llama, Qwen, Claude
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Nice to Have

• Strong hands-on experience building and maintaining large-scale Python applications.
• Proficiency building and operating cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.
• Experience with containerized services using ECS/EKS, serverless computing using Lambda, and data services including S3, DynamoDB, and Redshift.
• Experience with Step Functions, SageMaker, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or CloudFormation.

Location, Job Type, and Pay

• Location: New York, NY (hybrid)
• Job type: Contract
• Rate: USD $65 - $80 per hour (dependent on experience)
• Minimum experience: 3 years