Senior AI Engineer

About the role

Senior AI Engineer – Agentic AI Platform | Hybrid (Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL) | Contract-to-Hire

Pay range: $70–$85/HR (DOE and C2C vs W2)

About the Opportunity

Join a large, data-driven enterprise organization building a next-generation agentic AI platform from the ground up. This isn't a single-agent project — it's a foundational platform effort that will let business and engineering teams across the company build, deploy, and operate AI agents on a shared, secure, and observable enterprise backbone. If you want to shape how an entire organization does agentic AI — not just ship one agent — this is that role.

Hybrid onsite Tuesday–Thursday, based in either Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL.

What You'll Do

Architect and build reusable platform services that support multiple agent frameworks, models, and business domains — not one-off agent solutions.

Establish standard patterns for how agents register, discover each other, execute tasks, manage memory/state, and interoperate across systems.

Design multi-agent orchestration using event-driven and workflow-based approaches, including routing, task delegation, retries, and failure handling.

Build a centralized gateway for AI model calls, agent tools, and external service integrations, with consistent auth, throttling, and policy enforcement baked in.

Stand up full observability for agentic systems: distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, and visibility into agent decisions, tool calls, latency, and failures.

Build automated evaluation pipelines — benchmarks, regression tests, guardrails — that keep agent quality and safety in check as the platform scales.

Partner closely with architecture, security, and governance teams to bake in responsible-AI and secure-by-design practices from day one.

What You Bring

5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful hands-on time building AI/ML or agentic applications that made it to production (not just prototypes).

Strong Python skills and real experience designing APIs, microservices, or event-driven/distributed systems.

Practical experience with LLM-based systems: agent design patterns, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool/model integration.

Hands-on experience with at least one agent or orchestration framework (LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar) — we care more about depth of use than which one.

Solid grounding in cloud platforms, containers, CI/CD, and production support practices.

Observability chops: structured logging, metrics, tracing, alerting.

A self-directed, curious engineer who can ramp on new tools and problem domains without needing a formal onboarding path.

Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have: OpenTelemetry or similar distributed-tracing implementation experience, prior work building model/tool gateways or shared platform services, exposure to LLM/agent evaluation and red-teaming practices, and background in regulated or data-intensive enterprise environments.

Logistics

Contract type: W2 or CSC - Contract-to-Hire or Contract

Schedule: Hybrid — onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday

Location: Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL metro

Interview process: Technical video screening required for all candidates (camera on, no headphones during screening)

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