AI Engineer Standard III [USD]
Mindlance
About the role
Related Domains:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & MACHINE LEARNING
DATA & ANALYTICS
CLOUD AND PLATFORM ENGINEERING
TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY & SUSTAINABILITY
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & DIGITAL SOLUTIONS
Position Overview:
The AI Engineer designs, builds, and operates secure, scalable AI systems that advance the organization s digital strategy. The role centers on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, agentic AI (including Azure AI Agent Service and Model Context Protocol), and enterprise-grade service delivery across Azure and AWS. The AI Engineer partners with product, platform, data, and security teams to deliver robust, compliant, and cost-efficient AI capabilities.
Essential Job Functions:
"Architect and Implement AI Solutions
oDesign and build RAG pipelines using Azure AI/Search and vector databases: chunking, embeddings, hybrid/semantic ranking, re-ranking, evaluation, and citation display.
oBuild enterprise conversational systems (multi-turn, retrieval-grounded) with prompt lifecycle management, guardrails, audit logging, and telemetry.
oSupport multiple LLMs and modalities: Azure OpenAI, Llama (Meta), Claude, etc.., and task-specific OSS models (vision, speech), with policy-driven model routing for performance, safety, and cost.
"Integrate and Operate AI Infrastructure
oImplement Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers integrating with project related areas.
oProvide tool functions with RBAC scopes, schema versioning, rate limiting*** request/response validation, and audit trails.
oDeploy Azure AI Agent Service (AGA) patterns for agent registry/broker/governance with agent telemetry and policy enforcement.
oUse Azure Batch for large-scale, parallel inferencing/vectorization jobs; leverage AWS EMR for distributed data/feature processing in AI pipelines.
"Develop and Manage Data Pipelines
o Build ingestion and enrichment for RAG connectors and ETL/ELT: document normalization, PII redaction, metadata enrichment, SLA/SLO monitoring, and lineage.
o Operate large-scale vectorization with quality gates and drift monitoring.
o Use Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Databricks for orchestrated, scalable data processing; use AWS EMR for Hadoop/Spark workloads supporting AI features.
"Build Agentic AI Solutions
oDesign secure tool-calling and multi-agent orchestration using Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, Microsoft Agent Framework, CrewAI, Agno, and LangChain or others.
oKnow how to apply agent governance and MCP-based controls across heterogeneous agents and runtimes (register, observe, govern, retire).
"Model Evaluation and Optimization
oEvaluate and fine-tune open-source and proprietary models; optimize for quality, latency, safety, and cost with A/B and offline eval suites.
oImplement CI/CD with automated tests, security scans. Have knowledge on how to secure model workloads.
Software Engineering Emphasis (Core)
" CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, complexity, distributed systems, networking, concurrency.
" SDLC excellence: clean architecture, design patterns, SOLID principles, unit/integration/e2e tests, testing pyramids.
" Secure coding & threat modeling for AI apps: input validation, sandboxed tool functions, secrets hygiene, role-based access & least privilege.
" Performance engineering: profiling, caching, vector index tuning, latency/throughput optimization, and cost controls (token/embedding/compute).
" Collaboration & Delivery: Agile ceremonies, RACI clarity, cross-functional delivery with product/design/data/security.
Knowledge Requirements Cloud AI Tech Stack (Azure & AWS)
" Azure: Azure OpenAI; Azure AI/Search; Azure Machine Learning; Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS); Azure Functions; Azure API Management; Key Vault; Event Hub; App Insights; Log Analytics; Azure Batch; Azure Data Factory (ADF); Azure Databricks.
" AWS: Amazon SageMaker; AWS Bedrock; Amazon Kendra; Amazon Comprehend; AWS Lambda; Amazon API Gateway; AWS Secrets Manager; Amazon S3; Amazon CloudWatch; Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS); Amazon EMR.
" Vector DBs & Indexing: Azure AI Search vector storage, Redis, FAISS/HNSW; hybrid search + semantic ranking.
" Frameworks: Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, Microsoft Agent Framework, CrewAI, Agno, LangChain.
" Local/Edge Inference: running models locally via Docker/Ollama/vLLM/Triton; GPU provisioning; quantization (GGUF) for Llama-family models.
Educational Qualifications and Experience:
"Education: Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, Data Science or equivalent hands-on expertise.
"Experience: 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years in applied LLM/GenAI (RAG, agents, eval, safety).
Certification Requirements:
Mandatory:
" Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900)
" Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900)
" Responsible AI certifications
" AWS Machine Learning Specialty
" TensorFlow Developer
" Kubernetes CKA/CKAD
" SAFe Agile Software Engineering (ASE)
Additional Value (Preferred):
" Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102)
" Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate (DP-100)
" Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)
" Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204)
Required Skills/Abilities:
"GenAI architecture mastery: RAG, vector DBs, embeddings, transformer internals, multi-modal pipelines.
"Agentic systems: Azure AI Agent Service patterns, MCP servers, registry/broker/governance, secure tool-calling.
"Languages: C# and Python (production-grade), .Net, plus TypeScript for service/UI when needed.
"Azure & AWS services (see Knowledge Requirements) with hands-on implementation and operations.
"Model ops: eval suites, safety tooling, fine-tuning, guardrails, traceability.
"Business & delivery: solution architecture, stakeholder alignment, roadmap planning, measurable impact.
Desired Skills/Abilities (not required but a plus):
"LangChain, Hugging Face, MLflow; Kubernetes + GPU scheduling; vector search tuning (HNSW/IVF).
"Responsible AI: policy mapping, red-team playbooks, incident response for AI.
"Hybrid/multi-cloud deployments using Azure Arc and AWS Outposts; CI/CD for AI workloads across Azure DevOps and AWS CodePipeline.
Experience Matrix for Levels:
"Level I: 2+ years of experience
"Level II: 5+ years of experience
"Level III: 8+ years of experience
EEO:
Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.
Don't send a generic resume
Paste this job description into Mimi and get a resume tailored to exactly what the hiring team is looking for.
Get started free