AI Engineer

AI Engineer

Chicago, Illinois

Direct Hire

Salary Range : $120,000 - $160,000

Benefits:

• Full benefits start on day 1
• Company provides an employer match to employee 401(K) contributions by matching 75% of employee contributions on up to 6% of eligible earnings
• FTO - flexible time off - no limit
• Industry-leading benefits plans

The AI Engineer is a hands-on builder at the core of our organization’s AI First engineering transformation, designing, shipping, and operating production-grade AI systems from prototype to production. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you will work alongside the AI Solution Architect (who sets architecture standards and direction) and the AI Verification Architect (who builds the testing and verification frameworks your work is validated against), partnering closely with an AI First Product team to drive the evolution of our SaaS platforms.

This is a distinct role that supersedes the traditional Senior Developer position. In an AI First Agentic Operating model, "senior developer" is no longer a job a person holds: it is a capability the AI Engineer directs, exercised by coding agents under their guidance. The AI Engineer orchestrates that agentic development capability rather than performing hands-on coding as the primary activity, owning outcomes across building, shipping, and operating AI systems.

It is designed for accomplished software engineers ready to make that shift, from writing the code themselves to directing the agents that write it.

You will turn product specifications and Agile artifacts into working AI agents, LLM-powered features, and automation; integrate them with enterprise systems; and own their reliability, accuracy, and business impact in production. You will use Claude Code as your primary development tool, working in tight build-measure-learn cycles. Success is measured by what you ship and the outcomes it produces, not by activity.

Strong written and verbal communication matters as much as technical depth: you will collaborate daily with product, business stakeholders, and your engineering peers to translate real needs into reliable solutions.

• Drive continuous refinement of the AI agentic pipeline and its iterative development loop, informing architectural direction in partnership with the AI Solution Architect. Apply context engineering, enforce human-in-the-loop governance, and hold final accountability for all software delivered under your direction.
• Direct the design, build, and delivery of production-grade AI features and agents across the organization’s SaaS platforms, working within the architecture standards and spec-driven delivery models set by the AI Solution Architect.
• Implement and integrate AI tools, agents, agent skills, and services across the delivery lifecycle: specification, development, review, testing, documentation, and release.
• Build multi-agent workflows (orchestration, reasoning, planning, autonomous task execution) on distributed patterns such as queues, caching, and scalable APIs, and operate them with other coding agents.
• Translate Agile artifacts and product inputs into structured, agent-ready specifications, implement them through coding agents, and build and consume MCP servers that expose enterprise systems as model-ready tools, following the criteria defined by the AI Solution Architect.
• Use Claude Code as your primary enablement tool to develop, review, test, and document software in tight, iterative cycles, adopting spec-driven delivery models and bringing AI agents into day-to-day engineering, with a stated goal of 100% AI-generated code.
• Serve as the primary steward of the context store, the coding standards, patterns, domain knowledge,…