Senior AI Engineer (LLMs & Agentic AI)

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.

Note: This role operates under a contractor model and requires availability to work in the U.S. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).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 for production backend services (APIs, async I/O, typing/schema validation, error handling, and testing).
• Strong SQL skills working with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake preferred).
• Hands-on experience building production-grade LLM and agentic AI applications.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying MCP servers in production (server-side, consumed by other users or systems), including tool and resource definitions, context management, and multi-step orchestration.
• Understanding of MCP transports (stdio vs. Streamable HTTP) and authentication/authorization patterns for remote servers (OAuth/OIDC, scoped and resource-level access).
• 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, with direct ownership of these concerns in production.
• Experience designing intent classification and routing solutions for natural language applications, resolving user intent into the correct API and data-source calls.
• 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 Python 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.