Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer - Agentic AI Platform | Hybrid (Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL) | Contract-to-HirePay range: $70-$85/HR (DOE and C2C vs W2) About the OpportunityJoin a large, data-driven enterprise organization building a next-generation agentic AI platform from the ground up. This isn't a single-agent project -- it's a foundational platform effort that will let business and engineering teams across the company build, deploy, and operate AI agents on a shared, secure, and observable enterprise backbone. If you want to shape how an entire organization does agentic AI -- not just ship one agent -- this is that role.Hybrid onsite Tuesday-Thursday, based in either Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL.What You'll DoArchitect and build reusable platform services that support multiple agent frameworks, models, and business domains -- not one-off agent solutions.Establish standard patterns for how agents register, discover each other, execute tasks, manage memory/state, and interoperate across systems.Design multi-agent orchestration using event-driven and workflow-based approaches, including routing, task delegation, retries, and failure handling.Build a centralized gateway for AI model calls, agent tools, and external service integrations, with consistent auth, throttling, and policy enforcement baked in.Stand up full observability for agentic systems: distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, and visibility into agent decisions, tool calls, latency, and failures.Build automated evaluation pipelines -- benchmarks, regression tests, guardrails -- that keep agent quality and safety in check as the platform scales.Partner closely with architecture, security, and governance teams to bake in responsible-AI and secure-by-design practices from day one.What You Bring5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful hands-on time building AI/ML or agentic applications that made it to production (not just prototypes).Strong Python skills and real experience designing APIs, microservices, or event-driven/distributed systems.Practical experience with LLM-based systems: agent design patterns, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool/model integration.Hands-on experience with at least one agent or orchestration framework (LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar) -- we care more about depth of use than which one.Solid grounding in cloud platforms, containers, CI/CD, and production support practices.Observability chops: structured logging, metrics, tracing, alerting.A self-directed, curious engineer who can ramp on new tools and problem domains without needing a formal onboarding path.Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience.Nice to have: OpenTelemetry or similar distributed-tracing implementation experience, prior work building model/tool gateways or shared platform services, exposure to LLM/agent evaluation and red-teaming practices, and background in regulated or data-intensive enterprise environments.LogisticsContract type: W2 or CSC - Contract-to-Hire or ContractSchedule: Hybrid -- onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, ThursdayLocation: Dallas, TX or Chicago, IL metroInterview process: Technical video screening required for all candidates (camera on, no headphones during screening)

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