Ai Engineer

This role focuses on designing, building, and deploying production-ready AI and multi-agent systems within enterprise environments. You will serve as the primary AI engineering point of contact for sprint-based engagements, partnering closely with domain experts to translate business needs into robust, scalable solutions. The position emphasizes solution architecture, agent orchestration, observability, evaluation discipline, and the creation of reusable patterns that enable other teams to build AI agents effectively and reliably., * Embed within product or service line teams as the primary AI engineering point of contact for short, sprint-based engagements.

• Lead discovery sessions with subject matter experts to clarify goals, constraints, workflows, and adoption requirements.
• Deliver at least bi-weekly demos to stakeholders and drive alignment from initial discovery through go-live.
• Operate under sponsor-driven prioritization while maintaining strong engineering rigor and production readiness.
• Translate business and technical requirements into clear agent architectures, data requirements, and execution plans.
• Design and build multi-agent systems using Azure AI Foundry and orchestration frameworks, including routing, state management, memory, tool use, retries, fallbacks, and guardrails.
• Integrate AI agents with enterprise systems such as SharePoint, Teams, Azure AI Search, Databricks, SQL databases, and internal or external APIs as needed.
• Make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs to deliver value quickly while preserving reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Own the deployment of AI solutions into production, primarily as Azure-hosted services, typically using containers or other appropriate delivery mechanisms.
• Implement production-grade practices including environment separation, configuration management, secure secrets handling, telemetry-by-default, and rollback-friendly release strategies.
• Design solutions that operate effectively within enterprise constraints, including identity, access, compliance, and platform standards, without requiring deep specialization in any single corporate system.
• Ensure all delivered agents follow established tracing, logging, and observability patterns.
• Instrument agent systems using supported tooling such as Application Insights, Agent 365, LangSmith, and other evolving internal standards.
• Contribute to the definition and adoption of agent registration standards, including required metadata, automated population, and consistent inventory and visibility across the organization.
• Help standardize patterns and foundations so that AI delivery can scale across teams without repeatedly reinventing core components.
• Establish robust evaluation approaches that combine curated golden datasets, human review workflows, and automated testing both before and after go-live.
• Create and maintain evaluation datasets, including labeling strategies, edge cases, and regression test packs as part of delivery.
• Explain how evaluation metrics are calculated, when they are trustworthy, and how they translate into concrete system improvements rather than superficial metrics.
• Develop reusable assets such as reference architectures, templates, scaffolding, test harnesses, and practical "how-to" playbooks for AI agent development.
• Coach and support other teams building agents in platforms such as Copilot Studio, providing patterns, guardrails, integration guidance, and operational expectations where applicable., You will work across different product or service line teams, partnering closely with them to enhance and accelerate their AI development efforts. The environment is collaborative and delivery-focused, with short, sprint-based engagements and frequent stakeholder interaction, including regular demos and feedback loops. Solutions are typically deployed as Azure-hosted services, often using containers, and integrate with a variety of enterprise systems such as SharePoint, Teams, Azure AI Search, Databricks, SQL, and internal or external APIs. You will use modern AI and observability tooling, including Azure AI Foundry, LangGraph or similar orchestration frameworks, Application Insights, Agent 365, and LangSmith, while adhering to enterprise standards for identity, access, compliance, and platform governance. The role emphasizes production readiness, robust telemetry, and scalable patterns, offering the opportunity to shape foundational practices for AI agents across the organization over the course of a long-term contract-to-hire engagement.

• 3-5+ years of professional engineering experience delivering production software or services.
• Strong proficiency in Python, including building services, integrations, agent workflows, and evaluation harnesses.
• Proven ability to translate ambiguous requirements into clear, buildable architectural and implementation plans.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered agents and/or orchestration workflows, with multi-agent systems strongly preferred.
• Experience with Azure AI Foundry or comparable platforms for agents, evaluations, deployments, and safety or control mechanisms.
• Experience with orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph (or similar) and a strong understanding of stateful orchestration and tool-driven execution.
• Experience implementing tracing, logging, and observability for AI systems in production, including correlation IDs, traceability across agent and tool calls, and telemetry to support debugging and iteration.
• Comfort owning deployments into enterprise environments and working within established platform standards.
• Practical understanding of LLM behavior in real-world scenarios, including context limits, embeddings and RAG fundamentals, tool use failure modes, nondeterminism, and common evaluation pitfalls.
• Strong skills in artificial intelligence and applied AI engineering within cloud environments such as Azure.

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Experience working with OpenAI models or similar large language model providers.
• Familiarity with Copilot Studio or similar platforms for building and managing AI agents.
• Experience designing guardrails, safety controls, and operational standards for AI and agentic systems.
• Background in building reusable engineering assets such as reference architectures, templates, and playbooks to enable broader team adoption.
• Interest in and ability to coach or enable other engineering and product teams on best practices for AI agent development and operations.
• General knowledge of agentic and LLM systems, including patterns for multi-agent collaboration and orchestration.
• Comfort working in fast-paced, sprint-based environments with evolving requirements and priorities.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

This is a Contract to Hire position based out of Houston, TX.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $70.00 - $90.00/hr.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefits available for this temporary role may include the following: * Medical, dental & vision * Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital * 401(k) Retirement Plan - Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available * Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents) * Short and long-term disability * Health Spending Account (HSA) * Transportation benefits * Employee Assistance Program * Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Workplace Type

At Actalent, diversity and inclusion are a bridge towards the equity and success of our people. DE&I is embedded into our culture through: * Hiring diverse talent * Maintaining an inclusive environment through persistent self-reflection * Building a culture of care, engagement, and recognition with clear outcomes * Ensuring growth opportunities for our people Actalent is an equal opportunity employer. About Actalent Actalent is a global leader in engineering and sciences services. For more than 40 years, we've helped visionary companies advance their goals. Headquartered in the United States, our teams span 150 offices across North America, EMEA, and APAC-with four delivery centers in India led by 1,000+ extraordinary employees who connect their passion with purpose every day. Our Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Chennai delivery centers are hubs of engineering expertise, with core capabilities in mechanical and electrical engineering, systems and software, and manufacturing engineering. Our teams deliver work across multiple industries including transportation, consumer and industrial products, and life sciences. We serve more than 4,500 clients, including many Fortune 500 brands. Learn more about how we can work together at actalentservices.com.