AI Engineer - Agentic Systems Job Rockville area,Maryland USA,Software Development

AI Engineer – Agentic Systems

We are looking for an AI Engineer to design, build, and maintain intelligent agentic systems that drive business automation and decision‑making. You will work at the intersection of large language models, tool‑use frameworks, and production engineering — creating autonomous AI agents that reason, plan, and act. The ideal candidate has hands‑on experience with Python‑based agentic frameworks and frontier AI platforms such as Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT‑4o.

Important

Disclaimers:

Please note:

A few of our roles may require in‑person interviews at Cognizant offices or client locations, depending on project or client needs.

Candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship, now or at any time in the future.

In this role, you will:

Design and build agentic AI pipelines using Python and LLM frameworks (Lang Chain, Lang Graph, or similar).
Develop multi‑step agents capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex workflows autonomously.
Integrate frontier AI models — Claude (Anthropic) and GPT‑4o (OpenAI) — for code generation, summarization, and task automation.
Build RAG pipelines and apply prompt optimization techniques to improve agent performance.
Collaborate with product and platform teams to translate business requirements into agentic AI solutions.
Monitor deployed agents in production — tracking token usage, latency, failure modes, and hallucination rates.
Document architecture decisions, agent design patterns, and operational runbooks.

Work model
:
Hybrid / Remote

Location
:
Rockville, Maryland

What you need to have to be considered:

3+ years of Python development, including async patterns and API integration
Hands‑on experience building AI agents with Lang Chain, Lang Graph, or equivalent frameworks
Familiarity with agent architectures such as ReAct or Plan‑and‑Execute
Proficiency with Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI APIs, including tool use and function calling
Experience building RAG pipelines with vector databases
Strong prompt engineering skills (chain‑of‑thought, few‑shot, structured outputs)
Basic cloud deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with Docker

Good to Have

Fine‑tuning methodologies (LoRA, RLHF, DPO, SFT)
Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines
Agent evaluation frameworks (RAGAS, Deep Eval)
Observability tooling (Lang Smith, Weights & Biases, Arize Phoenix)
MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations
OCR / Document Intelligence services
Git Hub Copilot experience
Enterprise security for LLM deployments (PII masking, audit logging)
Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry
Multimodal or voice agent experience

Salary and Other Compensation:

The annual salary for this position is between $120,500K – $141,500 K depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate.

This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans.

Benefits

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off
401(k) plan and contributions
Long‑term/Short‑term Disability
Paid Parental Leave
Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Disclaimer:
The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.

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