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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # AI Engineer - **Company:** FalconSmartIT - **Location:** Los Angeles, CA, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Clean Code Principles, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Application Lifecycle Management, Business Logic, Audit Trail, Automation of Tests, Big Data, Encodings, Cyber Security, Continuous Integration, Data Validation, Information Engineering, Information Leak Prevention, Decision Support Systems, Key Management, Machine Learning, Metadata, Modular Design, Regression Testing, Cloud Services, Secure Coding, Software Engineering, SQL Databases, Software Technical Review, Data Logging, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Large Language Models, Software Troubleshooting, Indexer, Information Technology, Low Latency, Enterprise Integration, Machine Learning Operations, Software Version Control - **Published:** September 11, 2026 - **Apply:** https://jobs-us.falconsmartit.com/apply/job/detail?jid=11132699&cpid=1113&uid=153510&src=jobpost ## About the Role * Typically, 10+ years in professional software engineering, including meaningful hands-on experience delivering AI, machine-learning, search, NLP, or data-intensive applications to production; equivalent experience is welcome. * Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, prompt and context design, RAG, embedding/search systems, structured outputs, tool/function calling, and automated evaluation. * Experience with SQL and document/search stores, containers, CI/CD, source control, cloud services, and observability practices. * Strong software engineering habits: modular design, automated testing, secure coding, peer review, performance troubleshooting, and production ownership. * Ability to explain model limitations and engineering trade-offs to technical and nontechnical partners. * Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, data science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. ## Description AI Developer will build and operate AI-enabled applications for customer experiences, employee productivity, and operations. Use cases may include conversational support, knowledge assistance, search and discovery, summarization, classification, decision support, workflow automation, and content/metadata operations. This is a production engineering role. Success requires strong software fundamentals, disciplined evaluation, secure enterprise integration, and ownership of quality, latency, cost, observability, and supportability throughout the application lifecycle. Key responsibilities AI application engineering: * Build production applications using large language models, smaller task-specific models, retrieval-augmented generation, tool/function calling, workflow orchestration, and deterministic business logic where appropriate. * Develop secure APIs, services, adapters, and event-driven integrations for digital channels, customer-care platforms, enterprise knowledge, billing and entitlement services, content/metadata systems, and internal workflows. * Implement authorization-aware tool use, input validation, idempotency, timeouts, retries, fallback behaviour, circuit breakers, and human escalation paths. * Choose prompts, retrieval, rules, conventional machine learning, or fine-tuning based on evidence rather than defaulting every problem to a large model. Retrieval, data, and grounding: * Build ingestion, chunking, metadata, indexing, retrieval, reranking, citation, freshness, and deletion workflows for enterprise knowledge and approved content sources. * Preserve source permissions and customer/data boundaries throughout retrieval and generation; prevent unauthorized cross-user, cross-account, or cross-domain disclosure. * Partner with Data Engineering and domain owners on data quality, system-of-record alignment, lineage, and feedback loops. Evaluation and quality engineering * Create representative evaluation datasets and automated test suites for groundedness, relevance, correctness, task completion, refusal behaviour, safety, robustness, latency, and cost. * Run regression testing across prompt, model, retrieval, tool, and policy changes; analyse failure modes and improve the system using trace-based evidence. * Instrument online quality and business metrics, support controlled experiments, and incorporate human review for higher-risk or lower-confidence outcomes. Production operations and MLOps * Build CI/CD pipelines for code, configuration, prompts, evaluation assets, and model or index changes across separated development, test, and production environments. * Implement structured logging, tracing, token and infrastructure cost monitoring, model/provider health checks, alerting, dashboards, and operational runbooks. * Optimize throughput, latency, reliability, and cost using caching, batching, routing, prompt/context management, and appropriately sized models. * Participate in production support, incident response, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement. Security and responsible implementation: * Implement controls for prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, unsafe tool use, data leakage, malicious content, model abuse, and dependency/supply-chain risk. * Apply DIRECTV requirements for PII and payment-card data, identity and access, secrets management, retention, content rights, audit logging, and approved model/provider use. * Contribute reusable components to the AI control plane, including policy enforcement, prompt/model configuration, evaluation hooks, telemetry, and kill-switch or rollback mechanisms. Team delivery: * Work with Product Managers, UX, Solution Architects, AI Architects, Data Engineers, Cybersecurity, Quality Engineering, and Operations to deliver testable user outcomes. * Write maintainable code, automated tests, interface contracts, technical documentation, deployment guides, and operational runbooks; participate in code and design reviews. ## Related Videos - [Optimizing Discovery: PostgreSQL's Role in Transforming GetYourGuide's Search](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1647-optimizing-discovery-postgresql-s-role-in-transforming-getyourguide-s-search) - [A Data Mesh needs Open Metadata](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/505-a-data-mesh-needs-open-metadata) - [Alibaba Big Data and Machine Learning Technology](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/37-alibaba-big-data-and-machine-learning-technology) - [You are not an AI developer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1148-you-are-not-an-ai-developer) - [Dynamic Entities in .NET: Building Low-Code Systems on Top of Entity Framework Core](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100218-dynamic-entities-in-net-building-low-code-systems-on-top-of-entity-framework-core) - [Three years of putting LLMs into Software - Lessons learned](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1508-three-years-of-putting-llms-into-software-lessons-learned) ## Related Articles - [How to Become an AI Engineer](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/331-how-to-become-an-ai-engineer) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development) - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [What Are Large Language Models?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/304-what-are-large-language-models) - [MLOps – What’s the deal behind it?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/125-mlops-what-s-the-deal-behind-it) - [What is Software Engineering in the Age of AI?](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/640-what-is-software-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai)