Senior Agentic AI Developer/Forward Deployed Engineer

Role: Senior Agentic AI Developer/Forward Deployed Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL/Edina, MN (Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite/Week)
Duration: 6+ Months Contract
Experience required: Minimum 12+ years overall

Job Description:
We are seeking a hands-on Senior Agentic AI Developer/Forward Deployed Engineer to design, develop, integrate, and deploy production-ready enterprise AI applications.

The ideal candidate will have strong experience in Python, Azure, RAG pipelines, Agentic AI, and LLM-based application development, with the ability to translate business requirements into scalable, secure, and reliable solutions.

This is a hands-on development role, not a prompt-engineering-only, AI research, or architecture-advisory position.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy enterprise-grade Agentic AI and LLM applications.
• Build and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines for accurate, context-aware AI responses.
• Develop AI agents with tool/function calling, structured outputs, workflow automation, and validation.
• Build production-quality Python backend services, APIs, and enterprise integrations.
• Work with Azure-based environments to develop and operationalize AI solutions.
• Develop Databricks notebooks, SQL transformations, and data-processing pipelines.
• Implement data validation, cleansing, deduplication, reconciliation, and quality checks.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to gather requirements and deliver end-to-end AI solutions.
• Implement AI guardrails, role-based access controls, human-in-the-loop workflows, and secure data handling.
• Evaluate LLM outputs for accuracy, relevance, grounding, security, and reliability.
• Develop unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end tests.
• Implement AI application monitoring, logging, tracing, cost tracking, and production support.
• Support deployment, documentation, troubleshooting, and operational handover.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, backend development, or data engineering.
• 2+ years of hands-on experience developing LLM-enabled or Generative AI applications.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Python and SQL.
• Practical experience building Agentic AI applications and RAG pipelines.
• Experience developing and deploying enterprise AI applications in Azure environments.
• Strong understanding of LLM integration, prompt engineering, tool/function calling, and workflow orchestration.
• Experience developing REST APIs, backend services, and data integrations.
• Knowledge of AI evaluation, testing, security, governance, and responsible AI practices.
• Experience delivering production-ready AI applications beyond basic chatbots or proof-of-concept projects.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work directly with business and technical stakeholders.

Preferred Skills

• Databricks notebooks, jobs, and data pipelines.
• Experience with AI agent orchestration frameworks.
• Enterprise AI security, monitoring, observability, and cost optimization.
• Experience working as a Forward Deployed Engineer or embedded technical delivery engineer.