AI Software Engineer

WHY UT SOUTHWESTERN?
With over 75 years of excellence in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, UT Southwestern is committed to excellence, innovation, teamwork, and compassion. As a world-renowned medical and research center, we strive to provide the best possible care, resources, and benefits for our valued employees. Ranked as the number 1 hospital in Dallas-Fort Worth according to U.S. News & World Report, we invest in you with opportunities for career growth and development to align with your future goals.

Our highly competitive benefits package offers healthcare, PTO and paid holidays, on-site childcare, wage, merit increases and so much more. We invite you to be a part of the UT Southwestern team where you'll discover a culture of teamwork, professionalism, and a rewarding career!

JOB SUMMARY
Works under minimal supervision to design, build, and ship production artificial intelligence (AI) features within DIMS (Discovery Information Management System), the Innovation Hub's proprietary platform for managing faculty research Discovery Tracks. This is a hands‑on software engineering role focused on delivering working, maintainable code rather than research benchmarking or proof‑of‑concept experimentation. Develops agentic workflows, natural language search, retrieval pipelines, and model integrations that ground platform features in institutional scientific data.

Partners with the product owner, software developers, designers, and external technical collaborators to translate early‑stage commercialization workflows into accurate, traceable, and auditable AI capabilities. Serves as the Innovation Hub's primary technical owner for applied AI as DIMS scales.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS

Job Duties

• Builds and ships production AI features within DIMS, including multi‑step agentic workflows, natural language search, structured extraction, and recommendation and matching capabilities; writes and maintains the majority of the implementing code, moving agent concepts from specification to released functionality on a rapid delivery cadence rather than producing prototypes or evaluations alone.
• Designs, builds, and maintains AI agents end to end, including prompt design and iteration, tool and function definitions, orchestration and routing across multi‑step tasks, context and memory management, and structured output contracts; develops reusable prompt, tool, and orchestration patterns so that additional agents can be stood up without rebuilding shared infrastructure; establishes prompt versioning, evaluation harnesses, regression tests, and acceptance criteria so that agent behavior is measurable, reproducible, and safe to release.
• Integrates commercial and open large language models and related services into the platform through application programming interfaces, including Microsoft Azure Foundry/OpenAI Service and other institutionally approved platforms; manages model selection, versioning, cost, latency, rate limiting, and failure handling.
• Develops retrieval and data pipelines that ground AI features in institutional and external sources, including faculty and laboratory datasets, invention disclosure content, and public scientific and intellectual property data sources; ensures outputs remain traceable to verifiable source material.
• Partners with the product owner, software developers, and design to translate early stage commercialization workflows and stage gate criteria into working features; participates in requirements definition, technical scoping, and release planning
• Implements guardrails, monitoring, and observability for accuracy, hallucination, data leakage, and cost; ensures alignment with UTSW information security, data stewardship, and compliance requirements and with intellectual…