AI / ML Engineer

Experteer Overview As an AI / ML Engineer at Nelnet, you will design, build, and operate AI agents at scale, turning prototypes into reliable production capabilities. You’ll partner with data scientists and product teams to identify high-value use cases and establish reusable patterns and guardrails. Your work spans maintaining a healthy agent fleet, evaluating models, and expanding agentic capabilities across the organization. This role offers the chance to shape how AI is used in a regulated, enterprise environment and to contribute to business-wide automation and insights. Compensation / Benefits * Design, build, and deploy LLM-powered agents to solve business problems * Maintain health of existing agent fleet: monitor, diagnose, tune prompts, upgrade models without quality loss * Create and maintain evaluation suites for agent systems (offline tests, LLM-as-judge scoring, regression testing) * Instrument agents with end-to-end observability (traces, token usage, latency, cost, outcomes) * Design retrieval and context strategies (RAG, structured data, caching, chunking, ranking) * Build and maintain tools, APIs, and connectors for agents to interact with internal data * Design scalable AI pipelines and services on AWS; use Terraform and CI/CD for deployment * Implement safety controls, validation, access boundaries, and audit trails in a regulated environment * Collaborate with teams to expand agent adoption, prototype, and turn wins into reusable frameworks * Document agent architectures, prompts, tool contracts, data flows and limitations * Track foundation model and tooling developments and integrate useful improvements * Mentor team members on agent design, evaluation practices, and applied AI best practices Tasks * Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related field (or equivalent experience) * U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain U.S. 6C Security Clearance * Minimum 2 years of experience in ML/AI engineering or related roles * Demonstrated experience building agentic systems with large language models (tool use, orchestration, multi-step workflows) * Hands-on experience evaluating LLM/agent systems and designing eval sets * Experience deploying and supporting AI/ML systems in production * Experience with retrieval-augmented generation and grounding models in enterprise data Key requirements * Medical, dental, and vision coverage * HSA and FSA * generous earned time off * 401K and student loan repayment * life insurance & AD&D * tuition reimbursement

models, * Design retrieval and context strategies (RAG, structured data, caching, chunking, ranking) * Build and maintain tools, APIs, and connectors for agents to interact with internal data * Design scalable AI pipelines and services on AWS; use Terraform and CI/CD for deployment * Implement safety controls, validation, access boundaries, and audit trails in a regulated environment * Collaborate with teams to expand agent adoption, prototype, and turn wins into reusable frameworks * Document agent architectures, prompts, tool contracts, data flows and limitations * Track foundation model and tooling developments and integrate useful improvements * Mentor team members on agent design, evaluation practices, and applied AI best practices Tasks * Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or related field (or equivalent experience) * U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain U.S. 6C Security Clearance * Minimum 2 years of experience in ML/AI engineering or related roles * Demonstrated experience building agentic systems with large language models (tool use, orchestration, multi-step workflows) * Hands-on experience evaluating LLM/agent systems and designing eval sets * Experience deploying and supporting AI/ML systems in production * Experience with retrieval-augmented generation and grounding models in enterprise data Key requirements * Medical, dental, and vision coverage * HSA and FSA * generous earned time off * 401K and student loan repayment * life insurance & AD&D * tuition reimbursement