AI Foundation Model Engineer

JOB SUMMARY Design, build, deploy, and optimize enterprise-grade AI systems powered by foundation models, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows. The role converts AI concepts into secure, scalable, observable, and supportable production systems on the enterprise AI-ready platform (AIRP), which is currently AWS-hosted while following a cloud-agnostic architecture blueprint. Key Responsibilities Design and implement LLM-powered applications such as knowledge assistants, document intelligence solutions, workflow agents, summarization tools, and decision-support systems. Build RAG pipelines using embeddings, chunking strategies, vector databases, semantic retrieval, reranking, response grounding, and citation patterns. Integrate AI capabilities with AWS-hosted platform components, including model APIs, model gateways, data services, container platforms, and enterprise authentication patterns. Collaborate with cloud engineering teams on Terraform modules, IaC templates, environment promotion, CI/CD pipelines, release controls, and rollback procedures. Adapt and optimize models using LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning, distillation, transfer learning, quantization, and domain adaptation techniques where appropriate. Optimize inference workloads for latency, throughput, token efficiency, cost, reliability, and user experience. Implement model and application observability, including prompt logs, retrieval quality, hallucination indicators, drift signals, feedback loops, cost telemetry, and service health. Embed security, privacy, Responsible AI, and model risk controls into AI application design and delivery. Create production documentation, runbooks, release notes, test evidence, and audit-ready implementation records. Required Qualifications 7+ years in AI/ML engineering, platform engineering, software engineering, or applied machine learning. Hands-on experience with LLMs, transformers, embeddings, RAG, semantic search, and GenAI application patterns. Strong Python engineering skills with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent frameworks. Experience deploying production AI services using APIs, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, cloud-native services, and monitoring platforms. Practical exposure to AWS AI/cloud services or comparable cloud-native AI deployment experience, with ability to ramp quickly on AWS-hosted AIRP patterns. Working knowledge of Terraform/IaC, DevOps pipelines, release management, model evaluation, inference optimization, and secure data handling. Preferred Qualifications Banking, risk, compliance, financial crime, operations, or enterprise technology background. Experience with AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, OpenSearch, Kendra, Lambda, EKS/ECS, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI, Databricks, vLLM, Triton, MLflow, Kubeflow, or model gateways. Exposure to cloud-agnostic application patterns, reusable IaC modules, model risk, AI governance, audit controls, AI cost governance, and private or open-source LLM deployments. Education: Bachelors Degree