AI Engineer III

Job Title: AI/Python API Engineer

LOcation: Lake County, IL/ REMOTE

Duration: 3 months to start with

PRIMARY FUNCTION / PRIMARY GOALS / OBJECTIVES

The AI/Python API Engineer is a core technical contributor whose primary expertise is building AI/LLM agentic features exposed via APIs in Python within an enterprise cloud environment. The role is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a FastAPI (Python) backend that integrates large language models and other AI capabilities into enterprise production-grade services running on AWS. The defining requirements for this position are deep, hands-on experience across the areas of: AI agents, API development, Python, enterprise cloud (AWS preferred), and day-to-day use of Claude Code. These are the essential competencies; remaining skills, frontend and security, are valuable but secondary.

The engineer uses AI-assisted development tooling, Claude Code in particular, as a central part of their workflow to plan, write, review, and ship high-quality code quickly.

KNOWLEDGE / SKILLS

Primary expertise (required):

- Possess deep, hands-on experience with the AWS Strands agent framework (or equivalent) building AI/LLM-driven agentic features: prompt design, tool/function design and calling, observability, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), streaming responses, token/cost management, guardrails, and evaluation of model outputs.

- Maintain expert-level proficiency in Python, including modern idioms, async programming, typing, and testing.

- Demonstrate strong API development skills: designing and building robust, performant APIs (FastAPI strongly preferred), including async request handling, Pydantic data modeling, authentication/authorization, versioning, rate limiting, observability, and OpenAPI contracts.

- Demonstrate substantial enterprise cloud experience, AWS preferred: building and operating production workloads with services such as Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Secrets Manager, IAM, and CloudFormation/SAM, following infrastructure-as-code and cloud-governance practices.

- Demonstrate effective, day-to-day use of Claude Code and AI-assisted development workflows to plan, write, review, and refactor code responsibly, increasing throughput without sacrificing quality.

- Demonstrate critical problem-solving and debugging skills across AI, API, backend, and cloud concerns.

- Demonstrate clear and concise written and verbal communication, including the ability to document technical decisions for technical and non-technical audiences.

- Demonstrate the ability to prioritize and multi-task in a high-volume, rapidly paced environment.

Nice to have (not required):

- Experience with React 19 / TypeScript and modern frontend integration with backend APIs.

- Information security and/or security architecture experience: secure SDLC, threat modeling, IAM/least-privilege design, and secrets/data-protection practices.

PROJECT/PROCESS MANAGEMENT

- Design and implement FastAPI endpoints and services that expose AI/LLM capabilities securely and performantly.

- Integrate and operationalize LLM/AI features - prompt engineering, model selection, guardrails, and output validation - into production workflows.

- Deploy and operate application infrastructure in an enterprise AWS environment, following infrastructure-as-code practices.

- Use Claude Code and AI-assisted tooling as a primary part of the development process to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.

- Establish and maintain automated testing, CI/CD, logging, and monitoring for reliable, on-time delivery.

- Participate in code reviews and uphold coding and API-design standards.

- Communicate progress, risks, and technical trade-offs to stakeholders in a timely, accurate manner.

- (Nice to have) Contribute to the React 19 / TypeScript frontend as needed.

ACCOUNTABILITY / SCOPE

- Reports to the Engineering Lead / Technical Manager.

- Partners with product, data/ML, and platform/cloud teams on project initiatives.

- Accountable for the technical design, implementation, and operational health of the AI-driven Python API services and their cloud infrastructure.

- Accountable for adherence to coding, security, cloud-governance, and compliance standards across all delivered work.

- Adherence to all company-wide engineering, data-handling, and cloud-governance policies.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required:

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

- Substantial professional experience building production APIs in Python - typically 5-8+ years of software engineering experience.

- Demonstrated experience delivering AI/LLM-driven applications (prompting, RAG, tool use, output evaluation).

- Hands-on experience with FastAPI or a comparable modern Python API framework.

- Demonstrated enterprise cloud experience, AWS preferred, building and operating production workloads.

- Practical, demonstrable experience using Claude Code (or equivalent AI-assisted development tooling) in a professional workflow.

- Strong communication skills: verbal, written, and technical documentation.

Desirable / nice to have:

- Master's degree or equivalent related technical experience.

- React 19 / TypeScript frontend experience.

- Information security and/or security architecture experience.

- Experience working in regulated, high-visibility enterprise environments.