Senior AI Engineer (LLMs & Agentic AI)

Job description

About You You are a Senior AI Engineer passionate about building production-grade LLM applications and agentic AI systems. You thrive in collaborative environments where you design, implement, and optimize AI capabilities that power conversational experiences and intelligent workflows. You enjoy solving complex AI challenges, integrating cutting-edge LLM technologies, and continuously improving production systems through experimentation, evaluation, and engineering best practices. You're comfortable making production design decisions autonomously within a small, lightly-managed team, and defending those decisions directly to engineering leadership. You Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience. Strong proficiency in Python and software engineering best practices. Strong SQL skills working with cloud data warehouses. Hands-on experience building production-grade LLM and agentic AI applications. Experience implementing tool calling, MCP servers, context management, and multi-step orchestration. Experience integrating hosted LLM APIs such as Anthropic and OpenAI into production environments. Experience with prompt engineering, prompt versioning, fallback strategies, and cost/latency optimization. Experience designing intent classification and routing solutions for natural language applications. Experience building conversational AI solutions or multi-API orchestration workflows. Experience developing LLM evaluation methodologies, and demonstrated ability to reverse-engineer and work within a partially documented, brownfield codebase. Strong collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills. Demonstrated ability to explain your own technical work in first-person depth under sustained technical questioning, clearly distinguishing what you personally built, what you contributed to, and what you only observed. Professional English proficiency, with the fluency to sustain a full technical interview or deep-dive discussion without loss of precision. Nice to Have: Experience deploying, fine-tuning, and evaluating open-source models using Hugging Face. Experience with GPU acceleration and inference optimization. Experience implementing MLOps practices, including CI/CD, observability, and reproducible pipelines. Experience with vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Applied NLP experience. Experience building client-facing AI products. You Will Be Accountable for the Following Responsibilities: Build and maintain MCP servers, tool definitions, and context management capabilities. Design and implement intent evaluation, classification, and routing workflows, including orchestrating resolution into the correct API and data-source calls, with aggregation across multiple sources. Integrate Anthropic and OpenAI models into production environments. Manage prompt versioning, fallback strategies, and LLM performance optimization. Develop and maintain evaluation frameworks to validate model quality and production performance. Write SQL against model inputs and outputs to support evaluation and monitoring. Support the backend behavior of the chat / MCP interface. Collaborate closely with software engineers and AI specialists to deliver production-ready AI solutions. Participate in architecture discussions and contribute to AI platform design. Continuously improve AI systems through experimentation, optimization, and engineering best practices. Senior-level experience building production AI applications with Python and LLM technologies. Must have personally authored/built an MCP server (not simply integrated or consumed one). Experience designing and deploying conversational AI or agentic AI solutions. Strong experience with prompt engineering, LLM integrations, and evaluation methodologies. Conversational English proficiency. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. About Us We Are Engineered Different. At Applaudo, talented people design, build, and scale meaningful, AI-powered solutions that create real business impact. As an AI-native organization, we collaborate across design, development, cloud, data, and artificial intelligence to turn ideas into scalable products that transform how companies operate, make decisions, and grow. We are building a high-performance culture grounded in five values: Empowering Excellence, Collaborative Teamwork, Unsolicited Respect, Consistent Transparency, and Efficient Communication . These define how we work, how we support one another, and how we hold ourselves accountable. Applaudo is a place for people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and work alongside strong teams they are proud to belong to. Joining us means being part of an organization that is evolving intentionally, investing in modern ways of working, and leading AI-native transformation at scale.