Senior AI Developer (Full‑Stack) (contract)

Location: Charlotte, NC
Duration: 12 months
Work Schedule: Hybrid – 3 days in office, 2 days remote

About the Role

In this contingent resource assignment, you will consult on complex initiatives with broad impact and large-scale planning for Software Engineering. You will review and analyze complex, multi-faceted, larger-scale, or longer-term Software Engineering challenges requiring in-depth evaluation of multiple factors, including intangibles or unprecedented scenarios. You will contribute to resolving complex situations with a solid understanding of function, policies, procedures, and compliance requirements to meet deliverables. Additionally, you will strategically collaborate and consult with client personnel.

Responsibilities

• Architecture & Orchestration
  • Design multi-step agentic workflows with LangGraph (state machines, tools, retries, timeouts) and LangChain (chains, tools, memory).
  • Build guardrails (input/output filtering, red-teaming hooks) and observability (tracing, telemetry, logging, prompt/version tracking).
• RAG Pipelines
  • Own ingestion pipelines: chunking, embeddings, document normalization, metadata, and vector DB indexing (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS).
  • Implement retrieval strategies: hybrid (BM25 + dense), multi-vector, reranking, query planning, LangGraph retrieval sub-graphs, caching.
  • Build domain-specific adapters (schema, ontology alignment) and grounding with structured tools/knowledge bases.
• Vertex AI & Platform Engineering
  • Productionize services on Google Vertex AI (Models, Endpoints, Workbench, Pipelines, Vector Search, Feature Store).
  • Containerize with Docker, orchestrate with Kubernetes/GKE, and automate with CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Cloud Build).
• Full-Stack Delivery
  • Build user-facing apps (React/Next.js) and backends (Python/FastAPI, Node/Express), including authentication/authorization and rate limiting.
  • Develop tooling/services (e.g., document loaders, evaluators, red-teaming flows, prompt versioning, synthetic data pipelines).
• Evaluation & Reliability
  • Define and automate GenAI evaluation: relevance, faithfulness, hallucination rate, answer-exactness, latency, cost.
  • Use techniques like RAGAS, G-Eval, rubric-based human-in-the-loop, pairwise comparisons, A/B tests, and production feedback loops.
• Security, Governance & Cost
  • Implement data privacy controls (PII detection, masking), policy enforcement, prompt hardening, and audit logging.
  • Optimize latency and TCO (embedding/model selection, batching, caching, streaming, adaptive routing, quantization where applicable).
• Mentorship & Standards
  • Establish best practices for prompt patterns, orchestration, testing (unit & scenario), and model lifecycle management.
  • Mentor engineers; collaborate with product/design to scope features and deliver business impact.

Requirements

• Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.
• Software engineering experience; 3–5+ years of applied ML/GenAI building production systems.
• Expert with LangChain and LangGraph (tools, agents, state graphs, retries, sub-graphs, observability).
• Hands-on with Vertex AI (Foundational models, Endpoints, Pipelines, Vector Search, Model Garden; IAM & service architectures).
• Strong RAG practitioner (chunking strategies, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, rerankers like Cohere/Rerank or bge-rerank, evaluation).
• Deep experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, FAISS) and embedding models (OpenAI, Vertex, Cohere, bge-large).
• Production backends in Python (FastAPI) or Node.js, plus React/Next.js front-end experience.
• Solid cloud experience (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure a plus), Docker/Kubernetes, and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of GenAI evaluation (RAGAS, G-Eval, rubric scoring), observability (LangSmith/LlamaIndex observability/OpenTelemetry), and prompt/version management.
• Knowledge of security & governance: PII handling, isolation, data residency, prompt injection defenses, secret management.
• Excellent communication; proven track record turning ambiguous problem statements into shipped products.

Benefits

• Health Insurance
• Life Insurance
• 401K
• Voluntary Benefits