Applied AI Engineer

You'll be the technical backbone of the AI Center of Excellence — the point person for McAfee's AI Ops infrastructure and the personal scout on everything new in the AI ecosystem. You will own the platforms the rest of the company builds AI on, including the AI Gateway and AI Factory, managing them day-to-day and evolving them as demand grows. Working with InfoSec on policy and Cloud Infrastructure on the underlying platform, you will help keep McAfee's AI foundation secure, reliable, and ready to scale.

About the Role

• Serve as the point person for the AI Center of Excellence's infrastructure needs — the platforms McAfee's AI capabilities run on.
• Manage the AI Gateway — including logging, model routing, and budget thresholds/cost controls — working with InfoSec on policy and Cloud Infrastructure on the underlying platform to keep it secure, reliable, and cost-attributed.
• Build and maintain McAfee's MCP factory and skills factory — the reusable MCP servers, skills, and plugins that let the CoE and business teams build agents faster and more consistently.
• Own the McAfee MCP roster and skills registry, running the intake, prioritization, vetting, and publishing pipeline in partnership with InfoSec, and serving as the primary owner for pushing new, approved skills and MCPs live to the AI Tool Hub.
• Map legacy tools and integrations into the new skills/MCP catalog structure as part of migrating the company onto AI CoE-supported tooling.
• Evolve the AI infrastructure as demand grows, scaling capacity, adding capabilities, and hardening reliability as agent volume increases across the company.
• Drive model routing across model providers (e.g., AWS Bedrock, Claude Enterprise), partnering with Cloud Infrastructure to solve for reliability and observability as usage scales.
• Continuously scan the AI frontier — models, frameworks, agentic patterns, open-source shifts — and maintain McAfee's AI Tech Radar on a biweekly cadence.
• Surface what matters to the Head of AI CoE with a concise, opinionated take: what it does, whether McAfee should care, and how quickly a POC could stand up.
• Recommend and feed the POC pipeline, with at least half of candidates originating from your own scouting rather than inbound requests.
• Build and stand up whatever is selected for a POC, configuring it for McAfee's environment, stress-testing it, and reporting back with an honest go/no-go.
• Prove new capabilities end to end at prototype depth — enough to make a confident recommendation, not to run in production.
• Work closely with InfoSec throughout the POC process, engaging them early on security review, data handling, and risk so a promising tool clears the bar before it advances.
• Build custom MCP servers, integrations, and prototypes as needed to test a capability properly.
• Deliver technical demos to senior leadership, including VPs and the CIO — working prototypes, not slides about what could be built.
• Stay genuinely current on AI developments and translate that awareness into practical action for the team.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience building agents, including with coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar.
• Hands-on experience standing up and managing AI or platform infrastructure, such as API gateways, model-access layers, or comparable production services.
• Experience managing or operating an AI gateway (or comparable API/model-access gateway) — a core function of this role.
• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language commonly used for building MCP servers and integrations, such as Python and/or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform including deploying and operating services in production.
• Experience designing or integrating REST APIs, including authentication patterns (OAuth, API keys) and webhook-based integrations.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tooling (logging, metrics, alerting).
• Working knowledge of security and data-handling fundamentals — secrets and access management, data handling policies, and awareness of AI-specific risks such as prompt injection and data leakage.
• Strong understanding of the AI model landscape, including the strengths, weaknesses, and appropriate use cases for GPT, Claude, Gemini, and leading open-source models.
• Comfortable building and maintaining MCP servers and working with tool-calling patterns.
• Able to present and demo to senior leadership — this role regularly presents to Directors, VPs, and the CIO.
• Strong written communication skills — POC findings and Tech Radar updates must be clear and actionable.
• Proactively follow AI developments — you've tried the latest framework before being asked to, have opinions on model benchmarks, and can tell in two minutes whether something is real or hype.
• Experience managing structured intake, vetting, and publishing pipelines for developer tools or integrations is a plus.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and production reliability practices such as monitoring, alerting, and incident response is a plus.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks or benchmarks to support structured, defensible go/no-go decisions is a plus.
• Experience with enterprise agent platforms is a plus.
• Familiarity with McAfee's technology stack (AWS, GitHub, Jira, JFrog, Confluence, Claude) is a plus.
• Experience evaluating and recommending AI tools in a structured enterprise context is a plus.

Schedule

This is a Hybrid position based in Frisco, TX. We are only considering candidates within a commutable distance to the Frisco office. You will be required to be onsite on an as-needed basis; when not working onsite, you will work from your home office. We are not offering relocation assistance.

Benefits

• Bonus Program
• 401k Retirement
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Basic Life, Short Term Disability and Long-Term Disability Coverage
• Paid Parental Leave
• Support and Community Involvement
• 14 Paid Company Holidays
• Unlimited Paid Time Off for Exempt Employees
• 96 Hours of Sick Time and 120 Hours of Vacation for Non-Exempt Employees Accrued Each Year

Pay

The anticipated compensation for this position is USD $109,240.00/Yr. - USD $179,462.50/Yr. depending on experience and qualifications.