Sr. AI Engineer (MANTL)

About the role

Elixir is the internal AI platform Alkami's revenue organization runs on today. It is less than three months old, has increasing adoption across the organization, and is currently bottlenecked by a team of one. We are about to push it across the entire Alkami org as the platform AI lives on. We need an additional engineer paired tightly with our AI Engineering lead to make that possible without creating critical single-person dependency. This is a platform engineering role for someone who has shipped production software with velocity.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the AI Engineering lead to ship features from day one, ramping quickly into independent contributions on the Elixir platform.
• Complete a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) rotation in months 1–2 — embed with a business function to learn what the platform must support by being the one who needs it.
• Contribute to Elixir’s core platform: skill execution runtime, tool/MCP registry, retrieval and memory primitives, evaluation harnesses, observability and cost telemetry, and multi-model routing.
• Extend the skills surface: creating, editing, version control, AI assistance, testing, benchmarking, and permissions.
• Build event-driven background agents — absorb support-ticket pre-triage, ambient agents, and webhook-driven flows into Elixir as native event-driven flows.
• Productize what FDEs build — extract platform-level needs so each engagement compounds rather than serializes.
• Maintain clear and proactive communication with stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
• Demonstrate self-sufficiency by independently managing tasks, problem-solving, and meeting deadlines while adapting to new challenges.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a software, data, or AI engineer — the bar is “you’ve shipped production software with real users,” not pure tenure.
• Fluent in Python and at least one typed language (TypeScript, C#, Java, or equivalent).
• Internalized CS fundamentals: complexity analysis, recursion, algorithms, and data structures.
• Practical database depth — ACID transactions, contention, indexes, and migrations in both SQL and NoSQL environments.
• Built at least one full-stack application from scratch in a modern JavaScript framework (React or Svelte).
• Basic proficiency in Linux, sandboxed execution, micro-VMs, and containerization.
• Trainable and coachable — works best for someone without hardened framework preferences who is excited by an intense mentorship environment.
• Enthusiastic about the FDE rotation as a first project: comfortable interfacing directly with business stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally across engineering and business teams.

Desired Skills

• Experience with AI agents, agent harnesses, durable workflows, MCP servers, and context management.
• Consulting, requirements-engineering, FDE, or “upstream of engineering” experience.
• Familiarity with “big data” environments (Spark, EMR).
• AWS Cloud experience; banking, fintech, or compliance domain knowledge.
• Hands-on experience with Convex, Vercel AI SDK, React, DSPy, or semantic search.
• Experience working with SaaS offerings in financial services or high-growth technology companies.