Suffolk Construction Co Inc

AI Systems Engineer

Suffolk Construction Co Inc$170K — $222K *
Real Estate & Construction
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Experience designing distributed or service-oriented systems for production
  • Strong backend engineering skills in Python and another language (Java, NodeJS, Rust, Kotlin)
  • Experience with event-driven architectures (SNS/SQS, Kafka, EventBridge)
  • Familiarity with integrating LLMs (Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic) into systems
  • Hands-on knowledge of RAG pipelines and vector databases
  • Understanding of distributed system failure modes and API lifecycle management

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement production-grade RAG architectures
  • Build and deploy multi-model AI agents using AWS Bedrock and LLM providers
  • Develop dynamic model routing strategies based on complexity, cost, and latency
  • Create multi-agent orchestration frameworks for collaborative workflows
  • Design safe tool invocation patterns and guardrails for enterprise AI agents
  • Optimize inference pipelines for cost, performance, and reliability
  • Implement evaluation frameworks to measure model performance

Benefits

  • Work in a hybrid environment
  • Collaborate in Agile sprints with multidisciplinary teams
  • Contribute to internal AI playbooks and templates
  • Opportunity to shape AI deployment at a national scale
  • Engage in innovative projects that blend AI and construction workflows
Full Job Description
Overview

Role Summary

 

Join Suffolk’s AI Studio in Boston as an AI Systems Engineer, a hybrid role responsible for architecting and building both: 

  • The distributed systems backbone that powers enterprise-scale AI, and 

  • The agentic and LLM-driven capabilities transforming construction workflows 

  • This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and applied AI. You will design scalable APIs, event-driven services, and reliable infrastructure — while also implementing multi-model AI agents, retrieval pipelines, and AI orchestration frameworks that operate in real-world production environments. 

     

    You will help define how AI is built, deployed, observed, and scaled across Suffolk’s national operations. 

    Responsibilities

     

    AI & Agentic Systems Product Engineering & Deployment 

    • Design and implement production-grade RAG architectures
    • Build and deploy multi-model AI agents leveraging AWS Bedrock and LLM providers (Claude, GPT, Llama, Titan, etc.)
    • Implement dynamic model routing strategies based on task complexity, cost, and latency
    • Develop multi-agent orchestration frameworks enabling collaborative workflows (planner, retriever, executor, summarizer)
    • Design safe tool invocation patterns and guardrails for enterprise AI agents
    • Optimize inference pipelines for cost, performance, and reliability
    • Implement evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, hallucination rates, and response quality
    • Design fallback and degradation strategies for model outages or latency spikes 

     Distributed Systems & Platform Architecture

    • Architect and evolve service-oriented and event-driven systems supporting AI workloads
    • Design REST/GraphQL APIs with clear versioning, authentication, and backward compatibility strategies
    • Implement asynchronous processing pipelines using queues, event buses, and workflow orchestration
    • Ensure reliability through idempotent consumers, retry strategies, circuit breakers, and dead-letter queues
    • Make informed tradeoffs between relational, NoSQL, and vector storage systems
    • Build services that are observable, traceable, and production-ready 
    • Define and document architectural standards for AI platform services
    • Implement LLMOps: cost monitoring, latency optimization, usage analytics, and model versioning
    • Enforce security, governance, and access standards in line with enterprise policies

    Collaboration & Technical Leadership

    • Work closely with product managers, site AI engineers, and data scientists to iterate rapidly in Agile sprints
    • Communicate technical progress clearly to non-technical stakeholders; contribute to internal AI playbooks and templates
    Qualifications
    • 6+ years of professional software engineering experience (not including vibe coding)
    • Demonstrated experience designing distributed or service-oriented systems in production
    • Strong backend engineering skills in Python, and at least one of Java, NodeJS, Rust or Kotlin
    • Experience building and deploying event-driven architectures (SNS/SQS, Kafka, EventBridge, etc.)
    • Experience integrating LLMs into production systems (Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.).
    • Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases and building multi-agent AI systems
    • Deep understanding of:
      • Distributed system failure modes
      • API lifecycle management
      • Concurrency and consistency tradeoffs
      • LLM cost, latency, and reliability constraints
      • Tuning AI Agents for accuracy and performance 

    Preferred 

    • Experience building internal AI platforms or shared infrastructure
    • Exposure to large-scale SaaS or mission-critical systems
    • Experience designing multi-agent or orchestration frameworks
    • Experience with Databricks Lakehouse architecture
    • Prior experience in construction, manufacturing, or operational industries

    What Makes This Role Unique 

     

    This role requires equal fluency in: 

    • Designing distributed systems that scale
    • Engineering intelligent agentic systems that reason

    We are looking for engineers who understand that production AI is not just about model quality and prompt engineering — it is also about the systems that deliver, monitor, and evolve those models and agents safely at scale. 

     

    Working Conditions

    While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit for long periods of time; talk or hear; perform fine motor, hand and finger skills in the use of a keyboard, telephone, or writing. The employee is frequently required to stands; walk; and reach with arms and/or hands. Specific vision abilities include close vision, distance vision, depth perception and the ability to adjust focus. The employee will spend their time in an office environment with a quiet to moderate noise level. Job site walking.

    Compensation Information

    The expected salary range for this position (AI Engineer) in US-MA-Boston is between $170,000 and $222,600 USD.  This represents the typical salary range for this position and is just one component of Suffolk’s total compensation package.  Actual salaries may be based on several factors including, but not limited to, skill set, experience, education and other qualifications.  Suffolk offers a comprehensive benefits package as part of its overall compensation strategy.  Salary ranges may differ by geography and are reviewed regularly to reflect market trends.

    About Suffolk Construction Co Inc

    Suffolk Construction is a privately held construction company founded in 1982 and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company provides preconstruction, construction management, design-build, and general contracting services to clients in the healthcare, education, science and technology, commercial, and government sectors. Suffolk Construction has completed projects in 35 states and has offices in Florida, New York, Texas, and California. The company is known for its innovative use of technology in construction, including virtual reality and 3D printing.
    Learn more about Suffolk Construction Co Inc
    Size
    5,000 employees
    Industry
    Founded
    1982

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