Senior Applied AI Engineer – Agentic Systems
Location: Phoenix, AZ (Hybrid) Employment Type: Full-Time Base Salary: $150,000–$180,000 annually + equity
About the Opportunity
Our client is a growing, innovative technology company seeking a hands-on Senior Applied AI Engineer to help build and scale its enterprise AI platform.
This is an opportunity for an experienced engineer with a strong startup mentality who enjoys building technology from the ground up, solving complex problems, and taking ownership of solutions from concept through production.
You'll work closely with AI engineering leadership to develop production-grade AI agents that automate scientific, manufacturing, operational, regulatory, and commercial workflows.
We're looking for someone who can operate independently, move quickly, adapt to changing priorities, and deliver reliable, scalable solutions without relying on a large engineering organization or established infrastructure.
This is a true builder role, not a research position or a job focused solely on AI experimentation.
What Makes Someone Successful Here
Beyond strong technical abilities, the ideal candidate will demonstrate:
- Startup mentality: Comfortable with ambiguity, evolving priorities, limited resources, and a fast-paced environment.
- Builder mindset: Enjoys designing, coding, deploying, and improving systems rather than simply managing development efforts.
- Ownership: Takes responsibility for solutions from initial design through production deployment and ongoing support.
- Resourcefulness: Finds practical solutions without needing extensive direction, large teams, or established processes.
- Adaptability: Comfortable evaluating new technologies, changing direction when necessary, and learning unfamiliar business domains.
- Bias for action: Able to balance engineering quality with speed, making sound decisions without overengineering.
- Collaborative approach: Works effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including scientists, engineers, and business leaders.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Demonstrated experience building and deploying production AI agents or LLM-powered applications.
- Strong Python and/or TypeScript development skills.
- Hands-on experience with LangGraph, MCP, or similar agent orchestration frameworks.
- Experience with Anthropic Claude, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, or comparable LLM platforms.
- Strong experience developing RAG systems, including embeddings, vector retrieval, and context engineering.
- Experience with REST APIs, relational databases, asynchronous processing, and cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
- Experience with AI evaluations, guardrails, observability, and production support.
- Experience independently designing and delivering end-to-end technical solutions.
- Ability to thrive in a startup or similarly entrepreneurial environment with limited structure and rapidly changing priorities.
- Strong communication skills and willingness to contribute wherever needed to achieve business objectives.
Compensation & Opportunity
- Annual base salary of $150,000–$180,000, depending on experience.
- Equity participation.
- High-impact role with direct access to technical leadership.
- Opportunity to influence the architecture and growth of an emerging AI platform.
- Hands-on technical work solving challenging real-world problems.
Pay: $150,000.00 - $180,000.00 per year
Application Question(s):
- Are you currently located in the Phoenix Metro area and willing to work a hybrid schedule?
Experience:
- building production AI agents or LLM-powered applications: 3 years (Required)
- Strong Python and/or TypeScript development: 5 years (Required)
Work Location: In person
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