Senior AI Engineer

About the role

Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is hiring a Senior AI Engineer to join the AI Engineering team. Reporting to AI Engineering leadership, you'll design, build, and help operationalize the AI products that move SNHU's most important learning and operational problems forward. You'll work from inside small, embedded AI pods that partner with the SNHU teams who own those problems. A pod's job is to ship outcomes and leave the host team measurably more AI-capable than it found them.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with technical leadership. You'll set technical direction inside the pod and mentor engineers, but you're not a people manager. The pod operates with joint accountability across its three core seats: AI Analyst, Domain Product Owner, and AI Engineer (you).

Responsibilities

• Design and ship AI solutions - agent orchestration, tool use, memory, retrieval, and the integrations that connect them to SNHU systems of record and data.
• Oversee architectural decisions and their documentation (Architectural Decision Records), making choices the host team or sustainment owner can maintain after the pod departs.
• Design and operate solution-specific tests and evaluations; build the instrumentation that makes offline and in-product signals actionable.
• Implement agent and orchestration patterns using frameworks like LangGraph/LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP, or custom approaches, choosing pragmatically based on what the solution and the host environment can sustain.
• Surface delivery and technical risk early; make scope and architecture trade-offs decisively rather than letting them drift.
• Use AI development tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and latest tools as a daily part of how you ship. Maintain a clear point of view on where they help, where they fail, and how to validate their output.
• Pair with the host team's engineers on AI-augmented development practice, so they leave the engagement more capable, not just better served.
• Produce the standard pod artifact set, which includes Agent Design Briefs, ADRs, Evaluation Scorecards, Deployment and Operations Runbooks, and retros. Ensure the quality bar is high enough to allow the next pod and the next domain team to reuse what you built.
• Contribute to shared AI Engineering assets - prompt and skill libraries, evaluation templates, reference architectures, practice handbook entries - that codify what works and increase capabilities across the team.
• Partner with SNHU AI on governance, safety, evaluation, and adoption as they relate to your build work.
• Coordinate with IT on infrastructure, IAM, security review, and DevOps as pod work requires.
• Align with the host team and adjacent functions where mutual coordination makes sense, without duplicating their steady-state work.

Requirements

• 5+ years shipping and operating production software at scale in one or more modern languages. We hire for engineering judgment and shipped systems, not a specific stack. We use Python as our working language; we don't require deep prior Python, but you'll need to get productive in it quickly.
• Production experience in at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Hands-on production work with LLMs - orchestration, memory, tool use, evaluation.
• Experience designing agentic systems involving tool use, state/memory, orchestration, and evaluation. Familiarity with at least one framework, such as LangGraph/LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP, or a custom approach.
• Practical LLM evaluation - designing evals, reading offline vs. in-product signals, building the instrumentation to act on them.
• Infrastructure as Code (CDK, Terraform, or similar) and CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar) - self-sufficient, not a specialist.
• Experience with a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle.
• Demonstrated hands-on proficiency with AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and GitHub Copilot. Ability to guide and validate outputs to avoid and detect issues that can impact results.
• Experience translating ambiguous domain problems into shipped systems with non-engineering partners.

Benefits

• High-quality, low-deductible medical insurance
• Low to no-cost dental and vision plans
• 5 weeks of paid time off (plus almost a dozen paid holidays)
• Employer-funded retirement
• Free tuition program
• Parental leave
• Mental health and wellbeing resources

Pay

The annual pay range for this position is $113,908.00 - $182,287.00. Actual offer will be based on skills, qualifications, experience and internal equity, in addition to relevant business considerations. We expect this position to be hired in the following target hiring range: $125,868.00 - $170,293.00.

Schedule

This is a 100% remote role. We ask that our remote employees have access to a reliable internet connection and a dedicated, properly equipped workspace that is free of distractions. Employees must reside in, and work from, the United States.