Senior AI Engineer (LLMs & Agentic AI)

About the role

Applaudo is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design, build, and maintain production‑grade large language model (LLM) applications and agentic AI systems. You will work in a small, lightly‑managed team, making autonomous design decisions and collaborating closely with engineering leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Build and operate MCP servers, including tool definitions, resource management, and multi‑step orchestration.
• Integrate Anthropic and OpenAI models into production, handling prompt versioning, fallback strategies, and performance optimization.
• Design intent classification, routing workflows, and multi‑API orchestration to resolve user intents.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, write SQL for model monitoring, and support the chat/MCP interface backend.
• Participate in architecture discussions and continuously improve AI systems through experimentation and best practices.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong spoken English (B2+) for live technical discussions with US stakeholders.
• Proven experience delivering production AI applications with Python and LLM technologies.
• Hands‑on experience authoring and deploying MCP servers used by other users or systems.
• Ability to work independently in a partially documented brownfield codebase.

Required skills

• Python (async I/O, typing, schema validation, error handling, testing).
• SQL and cloud data warehouses (Snowflake preferred).
• LLM integration (Anthropic, OpenAI) and prompt engineering.
• OAuth/OIDC authentication, authorization patterns.
• Experience with vector databases, Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Familiarity with AWS services (Batch, ECS, Lambda, SQS).
• Knowledge of MLOps practices (CI/CD, observability, reproducible pipelines).
• Optional: Hugging Face model deployment, GPU acceleration, fine‑tuning, and open‑source model evaluation.