Applied AI Engineer, AI Center of ExcellenceWhat you'll do & how you'll make your mark .We are looking for a hands on Applied AI Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI problem solving. You will help build production AI experiences across Network Solutions, including conversational agents, business and website creation, knowledge and FAQ agents, content experiences, domain discovery, and intelligent automation.
You will work with senior engineers, architects, and product partners to turn customer and product problems into reliable, secure, observable, and cost efficient AI systems. This is an applied engineering role focused on building, measuring, and continuously improving real AI products.
Who you are & what you'll need to succeed- Translate product requirements into practical AI solutions using LLMs, RAG, tool calling, agents, deterministic workflows, or traditional software where appropriate.
- Build production AI services using Python, FastAPI, asynchronous workers, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, model APIs, and external tools.
- Implement reliable tool calling agents and multi step workflows that interact with internal APIs, MCP tools, business systems, and knowledge sources.
- Build event driven workflows using RabbitMQ, Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or equivalent platforms, including retries, dead letter handling, idempotency, and failure recovery.
- Build and improve RAG systems covering ingestion, chunking, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking, metadata filtering, context construction, and citations.
- Integrate models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and open weight ecosystems, and help select models based on quality, latency, reliability, and cost.
- Build and run AI evaluations using curated datasets, regression tests, retrieval metrics, LLM as judge techniques, groundedness checks, and tool execution evaluation.
- Debug hallucinations, retrieval failures, incorrect tool usage, agent loops, latency issues, provider failures, and unexpected inference costs.
- Operate as an AI powered engineer using Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or equivalent coding agents to accelerate implementation, testing, debugging, refactoring, and documentation.
What we're looking for - 3 or more years of professional software engineering experience building production backend, distributed, or cloud based systems.
- At least 1 year of hands on experience building Applied AI, LLM, RAG, NLP, or agent based applications, with production experience strongly preferred.
- Strong Python skills including FastAPI, asynchronous programming, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy or SQLModel, and production API development.
- Good backend and distributed systems fundamentals including REST APIs, concurrency, background processing, caching, reliability, and production debugging.
- Hands on experience with RabbitMQ, Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or equivalent queue and messaging architectures is required.
- Hands on experience integrating LLM APIs and building structured output, function calling, tool calling, or agent execution workflows.
- Experience building or contributing to a RAG or knowledge grounded system, including retrieval, embeddings, indexing, context construction, and evaluation.
- Working knowledge of PostgreSQL and data modeling, with exposure to Redis, pgvector, vector databases, or hybrid search technologies.
- Demonstrated use of AI coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent tools as a regular part of software engineering work.
Nice to have.You should be comfortable going beyond a working demo and understand the core engineering patterns needed to make AI systems reliable in production.
- Understanding of prompting, structured outputs, tool schemas, context management, retries, fallbacks, rate limits, caching, and streaming responses.
- Ability to use experiments and evaluations to compare approaches using measurable outcomes rather than subjective testing alone.
- Understanding of retrieval quality, grounding, hallucination mitigation, prompt injection risks, tool authorization, and practical agent guardrails.
- Experience with Docker, CI/CD, automated testing, logging, observability, distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, or similar tooling.
How you'll work You will often receive a product goal or technical direction rather than a fully specified implementation. You should be able to break the problem into manageable pieces, validate assumptions, implement the solution, and work with senior engineers when architecture tradeoffs require discussion.
- Turn product goals into testable technical tasks and prototype alternatives when the best approach is not obvious.
- Choose simple, maintainable solutions and avoid using an agent or LLM when a deterministic approach solves the problem better.
- Measure quality, latency, reliability, safety, and cost and use those signals to improve the solution over time.
- Own implementation across APIs, workflows, data, queues, model integration, evaluations, observability, and production support for assigned features.
- Use AI coding agents aggressively to increase engineering velocity while preserving testing discipline, security, maintainability, and code quality.
What will make you stand out - Experience with Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, PydanticAI, or equivalent agent frameworks.
- Experience building or consuming Model Context Protocol tools and servers, or working with model gateways such as LiteLLM.
- Experience with Azure AI Search, pgvector, Chroma, Kubernetes, Azure, OCI, or similar production AI platform technologies.
- Experience contributing to customer facing AI products, open weight model inference, AI safety controls, automated evaluations, or high scale backend platforms.
Curiosity, strong problem solving, solid software engineering fundamentals, and the ability to learn quickly and turn ideas into reliable production features are the foundation for this role.
Join us to build the agent-powered backbone of our AI platform-robust, model agnostic, and ready for millions of users.
This Job Description includes the essential job functions required to perform the job described above, as well as additional duties and responsibilities. This Job Description is not an exhaustive list of all functions that the employee performing this job may be required to perform. The Company reserves the right to revise the Job Description at any time, and to require the employee to perform functions in addition to those listed above. 
