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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # AI Engineer - **Company:** California, Department Of Transportation - **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $175,000.0 - $215,000.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, User Authentication, Distributed Systems, Protocol Buffers, Systems Analysis, Internet Security, IP Pbx, Mobile Application Software, PostgreSQL, Node.Js, OAuth, Regression Testing, Ruby, TypeScript, Speech Recognition, Core Voice Platform, ReactJS, Large Language Models, Backend, AI Platforms, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Graphql, React Native, Speech Synthesis, Grpc, Automation Anywhere - **Published:** August 21, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/sr-ai-engineer-san-francisco-ca--6a43c009-b449-478a-ada1-9963d8e14d9f ## About the Role * 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend, infrastructure, or platform systems. * Experience shipping LLM-based or AI-powered systems to production, beyond prototypes and demos. * Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals, including APIs, typed service contracts, service boundaries, failure handling, schema evolution, scalability, and operating against systems you do not fully control. * A strong understanding of authorization, data boundaries, and the engineering controls required when AI systems operate on sensitive information. * Exercises good judgment about where models should be used, where deterministic software is the better choice, and where additional safeguards or human intervention are required. * Experience designing abstractions and platform capabilities that can support multiple use cases without overfitting to the first one. * Comfort working in ambiguity and turning emerging problems into clear technical decisions, documented patterns, and working systems. * Strong written and verbal communication across engineering, product, security, compliance, and data teams. * A bias toward pragmatism - shipping useful systems, learning from real-world usage, and iterating. We also expect depth in several of the following: * Agent-based systems, including agent orchestration, tool/function calling, MCP, structured outputs, context management, or similar patterns for connecting models to external systems and data. * AI evaluation systems, including offline evals, regression testing, version comparison, and measuring whether changes improve or degrade system behavior. * AI observability and tracing, including understanding model calls, tool calls, agent execution paths, failures, latency, and production behavior. Experience with platforms or standards such as LangSmith, Braintrust, Arize Phoenix, OpenTelemetry, or similar is valuable. EXTRA CREDIT: * Experience with gRPC, protobuf, GraphQL, or other strongly typed service interfaces. * Experience with OAuth, delegated authorization, service-to-service authentication, or similar identity and access patterns. * Production experience with retrieval, structured output, classification, or other common LLM application patterns. * Experience building developer platforms or internal platform infrastructure. * Experience in healthcare technology or another highly regulated environment. * Familiarity with HIPAA, PHI, or other sensitive-data requirements. * Experience working with identity or data models that span multiple systems and sources of truth. * Experience with voice AI, such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or real-time conversational voice systems. Our Stack: Rightway's platform spans TypeScript, Node.js, React, React Native, Ruby, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes, with gRPC and protobuf across a distributed set of internal services. You do not need experience with every technology in our stack. We care more about strong engineering fundamentals, relevant depth, sound technical judgment, and the ability to learn quickly., Application Programming Interface (API), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Authentication, Communication Skills, Customer Experience, Data Modeling, Distributed Computing, Ecosystems, GraphQL, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Healthcare, Human Health, Internet Security, MCP - Microsoft Certified Professional, Medications, Mobile Applications, OAuth, Operating Systems, Patient Care, Pharmacy, Presentation/Verbal Skills, Product Demonstration, Product Documentation, Production Systems, Prototyping, Quality Metrics, Regression Testing, System Operations, Systems Analysis, Use Cases, Voice Applications, Writing Skills ## Description Rightway helps members get the right care at the right time and price. Hundreds of thousands of the requests we handle every year involve questions like: What is the status of my prior authorization? What will this drug cost? How does my benefit apply? Answering these questions well requires getting the right data from the right systems, understanding the context, and communicating the answer clearly. Today, much of that work is done manually. We are building Agent OS, our platform for creating and operating AI-powered workflows across Rightway. It provides the foundation for connecting AI to our systems, evaluating its performance, and running it safely and reliably in production. This is an early, foundational platform build. You will be one of a small number of engineers shaping the architecture and engineering patterns behind how AI operates across Rightway. The hard problems here are not just about model or prompt quality. They are about building systems whose correctness can be measured, whose access to sensitive data can be controlled, and whose architecture can support many workflows without becoming fragile or overly specialized. WHAT YOU'LL DO: * Build the core platform for running AI-powered workflows reliably in production. * Create safe, well-defined ways for AI systems to interact with Rightway's existing services and data. * Design the authorization and data-access patterns required to operate AI in a healthcare environment. * Build evaluation infrastructure that helps us measure quality, compare changes, catch regressions, and make informed decisions about what is ready for production. * Develop the observability, tracing, and auditability needed to understand how AI systems behave in production. * Design operational controls that allow us to deploy AI workflows safely and evolve them over time. * Establish reusable platform patterns that other engineers can use to build AI-powered capabilities. * Make thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions as the ecosystem around agents, models, tools, and evaluation continues to evolve. * Partner closely with product, security, compliance, data, and engineering teams to turn new AI capabilities into production systems. * Help shape the technical direction of Rightway's broader AI platform as both the technology and our use cases evolve. ## Related Videos - [Exploring the Power of gRPC-Gateway for Writing RESTful Services](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/2072-exploring-the-power-of-grpc-gateway-for-writing-restful-services) - [Coffee with Developers: David Heinemeier Hansson](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/875-coffee-with-developers-david-heinemeier-hansson) - [Keeping applications secure by evolving OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100152-keeping-applications-secure-by-evolving-oauth-2-0-and-openid-connect) - [One AI API to Power Them All](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1601-one-ai-api-to-power-them-all) - [Boosting OpenSearch Performance: gRPC Search in Action](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1964-boosting-opensearch-performance-grpc-search-in-action) - [Coffee with Developers - Maria Apazoglou](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1209-coffee-with-developers-maria-apazoglou) ## Related Articles - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [What is Software Engineering in the Age of AI?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/640-what-is-software-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai) - [Graph and AI Trends 2026: Why Is AI Running but Not Yet Delivering?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/680-graph-and-ai-trends-2026-why-is-ai-running-but-not-yet-delivering) - [Dev Digest 137 - AI'm not sure about this](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/485-dev-digest-137-ai-m-not-sure-about-this)