Lead AI Platform Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Job Title: Lead AI Platform Engineer
Location: St. Louis, MO (On-site)
Employment Type: Contract (Only W2 through ZipStaff)

About the Opportunity

ZipStaff is seeking a Lead AI Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate production AI solutions for a major energy and utilities organization.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on agentic workflows, RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability. You will establish reusable AI patterns, raise engineering standards, and deliver enterprise-grade AI systems that are reliable, measurable, and integrated with existing APIs, applications, and data sources.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions.
• Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines.
• Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures.
• Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability.
• Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities.
• Develop automated testing and regression validation processes.
• Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise applications, and data sources.
• Design reusable AI patterns, frameworks, and components that increase platform scalability and team productivity.
• Establish engineering best practices and contribute to code reviews.
• Research and adopt emerging AI technologies where they provide business value.
• Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into AI solutions.

Required Qualifications:

• 7–8+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade production software.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience building, deploying, and operating production AI systems.
• Experience designing and implementing RAG solutions.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks.
• Hands-on experience with LangGraph or similar agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience building AI workflows that leverage tools, APIs, and external systems.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks and quality measurement.
• Experience implementing AI observability and tracing solutions.
• Understanding of agent architecture patterns, prompt engineering, and LLM evaluation techniques.
• Experience with AWS in production environments.
• Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices
• Knowledge of secure coding principles and responsible AI practices.
• Experience collaborating within Agile software development teams.
• Ability to work on-site in St. Louis, MO.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with AgentBricks.
• Experience with Microsoft Copilot extensibility and agent development.
• Experience with LangChain and related frameworks.
• Experience with MCP integrations.
• Experience with vector databases and semantic search.
• Experience with AWS Bedrock.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, LangSmith, Grafana, MLflow, DeepEval, or similar tooling.
• Experience deploying multi-agent systems.
• Experience with Terraform.
• AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, or AI-related certifications.

About ZipStaff:

ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches and long-term success.

To apply , please submit your resume highlighting your production AI systems experience, Python, RAG, Databricks, and LangGraph (or similar) agent orchestration background.