Software Developer (Emerging Careers)- Hybrid, Cary, North Carolina

About the job

The Platform Products division is looking for a Software Developer (Emerging Careers) specialized in Generative AI to join the engineering team drivingSAS Retrieval Agent Manager. In this role, you will help build and scale cutting-edge, enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and autonomous agent architectures.

You will play a pivotal role in integrating SAS VIYA agentic technologies with vectorized customer document data, ensuring our LLM-driven solutions are secure, high-performing, and highly scalable. This is an opportunity to directly shape how enterprise customers deploy GenAI at scalebyengineering the production-grade infrastructure and guardrails that let sophisticated agentic systems run reliablyand respond accuratelyin missioncritical environments.

As a Software Developer (Emerging Careers), you will:

• Collaborate on the ingestion, processing, and management of vectorized customer document data to optimize retrieval accuracy, latency, and agentic integrations.
• Maintain accountability for the entire lifecycle of the code, from translation of product requirements into actionable features, to rigorous testing (functional, unit, and performance), code reviews, and post-deployment support.
• Design, develop, and maintain autonomous agent architectures and RAG pipelines usingLangChainto interface seamlessly with SAS VIYA offerings.
• Integrate rigorous LLM defensive frameworks and operationalGuardrailsto ensure safe, compliant, and deterministic model behaviors across enterprise data.
• Build and execute systematic validation frameworks to quantify LLM performance, tracking key metrics (such as context recall, faithfulness, and answer relevance) to ensure the highest output quality.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related technical field
• Minimum 2 years of experience in software development
• Production-level Python development experience with a deep understanding of object-oriented design patterns, memory optimization, and asynchronous programming.
• Hands-on experience building complex, stateful applications usingLangChainor similar orchestrators.
• Hands-on experience developing and integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and clients to expose tools, data sources, and APIs for consumption by LLM-driven agents in production environments.
• Experience deploying LLM-as-a-judge or empirical evaluation tooling (e.g., Ragas, TruLens, MLflow) to bench and score generative outputs.
• Practical experience creating, deploying, and managing containerized cloud workloads usingDockerorKubernetes.
• Proficiency with version control (git, GitHub workflows, branching strategies, and rigorous code reviews).
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

Additional competencies, knowledge and skills

• Adaptability:Approaches architectural shifts and evolving GenAI trends with a growth mindset, treating rapid technological changes as opportunities for innovation.
• Collaborating:Actively seeks input from cross-functional teams, leveraging collective engineering strengths to solve complex data and orchestration challenges.
• Communication:Translates complex AI concepts and metric evaluation data into clear, actionable technical insights for both technical stakeholders and product management.
• Quality Orientation:Demonstrates a vigilant commitment to minimizing hallucination, optimization bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities in production GenAI deployments.
• Experience working directly with vector databases, embeddings, and complex document parsing methodologies.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and ideally their AI services e.g. Azure Open AI.
• Experience implementing safety, alignment, or content-filtering layers (e.g., NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI) within LLM pipelines.
• Experience with CI/CD deployment automation tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Exposure to project management frameworks and tracking tools like Jira for task tracking, sprint planning and collaboration.

World-class benefits

Highlights include...

• Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
• Medical plan options include:
  • PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
  • HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
• Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) thats free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There's a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
• An industry-leading 401k plan.
• Tuition Assistance Program and programs and resources to support your development
• Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
• Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
• Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees.

You are welcome here.

At SAS, its not about fitting into our culture 6 its about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our inclusive workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers.

Additional Information:

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