Senior AI Engineer — Agentic Systems

Senior AI Engineer — Agentic Systems (Contract)

Currently building AI agents that serve millions of customers directly. This is not a chatbot bolt-on or an innovation-lab experiment: our agentic platform sits in the production path of real customer conversations, with the reliability, latency, and safety bar that implies. We're engaging senior engineers who have actually shipped agentic systems — people who have felt the difference between a demo that works and an agent that survives contact with real users.

You'll join a small, senior team moving at startup pace with enterprise-scale distribution.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build production agentic workflows for customer-facing use cases — multi-turn conversation, tool calling, retrieval, escalation, and human handoff.
• Own agent orchestration end to end using Lang Graph/Lang Chain (or equivalent frameworks), including state management, guardrails, and failure recovery.
• Integrate agents with our core service layer: existing Java/Spring microservices, APIs, and event streams are the hands and feet of every agent you build.
• Build and tune the evaluation loop — automated evals, regression suites, trace analysis, and A/B measurement of agent quality.
• Work on the inference and serving layer: model routing, prompt/context management, and self-hosted serving with vLLM alongside commercial LLM APIs.
• Harden everything for a regulated, high-trust environment: PII handling, auditability, deterministic fallbacks, and observability.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with senior/lead-level ownership of production systems.
• Proven hands-on delivery of LLM-based agentic systems in production — not coursework, not POCs. Expect to walk us through architecture, failure modes, and eval strategy of something you shipped.
• Strong Python (primary agent/ML stack) and Java (service integration) — both are daily-use languages here.
• Depth in the standard agent stack:
  Lang Chain, Lang Graph, prompt/context engineering, tool/function calling, RAG pipelines.
• Working knowledge of PyTorch and model fundamentals — enough to fine-tune, debug model behavior, and reason about tradeoffs.
• Experience with LLM serving/inference — vLLM or comparable (TGI, TensorRT-LLM), plus commercial APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock/Vertex).
• Solid distributed-systems fundamentals: APIs, queues, caching, observability, CI/CD.

Major Plus:

• Hands-on experience with agent-builder platforms such as Sierra or Decagon — deploying, extending, or evaluating them for customer-service use cases.
• Voice agents, real-time/streaming inference, or contact-center integration.
• Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare) — model risk, compliance review, audit trails.
• Eval frameworks (Lang Smith, Braintrust, custom harnesses) and LLM safety/guardrail tooling.

Rate: $90 - 110/hour

At KAYGEN, people are at the heart of everything we do. We foster a diverse, inclusive, and employee-driven culture where every individual is valued, empowered, and encouraged to bring their authentic self to work. Our candidate-first approach means we are committed to understanding your career goals and connecting you with opportunities that align with your aspirations, skills, and potential. Whether you're taking the next step in your career or searching for your dream opportunity, KAYGEN is more than a staffing partner—we're a community dedicated to helping you grow, succeed, and thrive.

Join us and discover a place where your talent is recognized, your ambitions are supported, and your future is built alongside a team that invests in your success every step of the way.

Benefits:

• Free Healthcare Insurance
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Free Life Insurance
• Sick Time Off

Achieve your Kaizen by clicking here. A unique and exclusive talent community supported by KAYGEN, that includes programs like:

• Mentorship Program
• Certifications
• Referrals
• Family and Wellness benefits
• Continuous Growth and Career Development