Associate Principal, Artificial Intelligence Engineering

About the role

Job Title: Associate Principal, Artificial Intelligence Engineering

Location: Chicago, IL (Onsite – Hybrid - 3 days in a week)

Position Type: Fulltime permanent position

Responsibilities:

Summary

Client's AI Research & Engineering (AIRE) team is building the company's first generation of agentic AI capabilities on Anthropic's Claude models and AWS infrastructure. The Associate Principal, AI Engineering owns the design and delivery of agentic AI systems end-to-end, mentors junior engineers, and contributes technical judgment on AI application and/or AI infrastructure work in a largely greenfield environment.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

Own the design and delivery of agentic AI systems end-to-end, from architecture through production deployment

Architect agent orchestration patterns, tool and context integration, and evaluation pipelines for reliability in a regulated environment

Own AI infrastructure supporting AIRE's agents and applications on AWS, and contribute to the team's growing infrastructure self-sufficiency

Implement technical safeguards against AI-specific risks, including hallucination detection, prompt injection defense, and output validation, in collaboration with Client's AI Governance function

Build audit logging and human-in-the-loop checkpoints into agentic workflows so agent actions remain traceable and reviewable in a regulated environment

Mentor Associate and Senior Associate engineers through code and architecture review

Contribute technical point of view to the team's evolving engineering standards and practices, in partnership with the Executive Director

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

Experience mentoring or elevating the work of junior engineers

Demonstrated ownership of production systems from design through deployment

Ability to work effectively in a still-forming, fast-moving team environment

This position is not eligible for employment visa sponsorship. Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for sponsorship now or in the future.

Technical Skills:

Required: Strong Python; proficient SQL; solid distributed systems and API design fundamentals

Required: Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications or agentic systems

Required: Working knowledge of AI-specific risk areas (prompt injection, output validation, hallucination mitigation, data privacy), or demonstrated ability to build this expertise quickly

Required: Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred); comfort with Docker, CI/CD, and containerization fundamentals

Preferred: Direct experience with Claude, the Anthropic API, or Claude.ai/Console

Preferred: Experience designing agent orchestration or Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based integrations

Preferred: Production experience operating LLM-powered applications or agentic systems at scale

Preferred: Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)

Preferred: Background in financial services, derivatives, or other regulated industries

Preferred: Exposure to AI security practices such as red-teaming or adversarial testing of model inputs and outputs

Preferred: Data engineering experience (pipelines, data modeling), particularly for candidates interested in AI infrastructure work

Education and/or Experience:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; Master's preferred

4-7 years of software engineering experience, with production AI/LLM systems experience preferred