AI Agent Engineer - 12 Months Contract

Job Description

The engineer works within agile teams alongside Product, Data Science, and Architecture to take agent use cases from prototype to production.

Key Responsibilities:

• AI Agent Development on Microsoft Foundry
• Design, build, and deploy pro-code AI agents on Microsoft Foundry, leveraging its agent framework, model catalogue, and tool/function-calling capabilities.
• Integrate agents with Palantir Foundry via MCP (Model Context Protocol) to fetch enterprise data and execute Ontology actions, alongside other tool, retrieval, memory, and multi-agent orchestration patterns in Python.
• Build evaluation harnesses and guardrails (groundedness, safety, cost, latency) and iterate on prompts, tools, and architectures based on measured outcomes.
• LLM Engineering & Productionization
• Apply prompt engineering, structured output, RAG, and grounding techniques appropriate to each use case.
• Operate agents in production: observability, tracing, cost monitoring, regression testing, and incident response.
• Manage versioning of prompts, tools, and agent configurations alongside code.
• Azure & Platform Integration
• Integrate with Azure services (Azure OpenAI, AI Search, Storage, Functions, Container Apps, Key Vault, Entra ID) to deliver secure, scalable agent solutions.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for agent deployment, including automated evals as a release gate.
• Implement authentication, authorization, secret management, and data-handling patterns aligned with enterprise security standards.
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Work closely with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and IT Architects to translate agent use cases into delivery plans.
• Communicate trade-offs (model choice, latency, cost, accuracy) clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Champion agentic patterns and reusable components across the engineering organization.

Qualifications:

• Software engineering experience with hands-on production experience building LLM-based / agentic systems (tool use, orchestration, RAG, evals).
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related quantitative field
• Advanced degrees preferred.
• Strong Python — idiomatic, typed, tested; comfortable with async and modern packaging
• Proven experience building production AI agents in code (e.g. Microsoft Foundry / Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Agents SDK, or equivalent custom frameworks)
• Microsoft Foundry experience strongly preferred (agent authoring, model catalog, connectors, deployment)
• Azure exposure — Azure OpenAI, AI Search, identity, storage, serverless compute; familiarity with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
• Deep working knowledge of LLM application patterns: tool/function calling, structured outputs, RAG, memory, multi-agent orchestration
• Experience with evaluation frameworks and observability for LLM systems (tracing, prompt/response logging, automated evals)
• DevOps fundamentals: Git, CI/CD, containers, infrastructure-as-code; exposure to data engineering and vector stores is a plus
• High-energy, ownership-driven mindset
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity
• Experience in agile/start-up environments preferred
• Track record of taking AI/ML or agent projects from prototype to production