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Shift Technology is building AI agents that transform insurance operations. We are seeking an experienced Staff AI Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for our AI capabilities—a hands-on senior builder who excels at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technologies (agentic frameworks, LLM orchestration, Model Context Protocol, GenAI) and production-grade software engineering.
You will work directly with data scientists, software engineers, and product leaders to design, prototype, and ship state-of-the-art AI systems into production. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for someone who wants to drive architectural strategy and mentor others without giving up hands-on coding and building.
Key responsibilities:
- Build and architect agentic systems (hands-on): Lead by doing. Design, prototype, and build production-ready agentic workflows, custom orchestration layers, and tool-calling integrations using modern frameworks.
- Bridge AI and production engineering: Move AI prototypes into robust, production-grade microservices on Azure. Ensure AI components are scalable, low-latency, and well-integrated into the broader tech stack.
- Implement next-gen AI standards: Experiment with and integrate emerging paradigms into production, including Model Context Protocol (MCP), advanced RAG patterns, vector pipelines, and structured LLM outputs.
- Drive AI quality and LLMOps: Establish and implement operational frameworks for experiment tracking, evaluations, prompt engineering, latency optimization, token budget governance, and model observability.
- Influence and upskill: Act as a technical mentor for agent-focused engineering squads. Lead technical design reviews, set coding standards, and help elevate the team's AI engineering capabilities.
- Stay at the cutting edge: Continuously benchmark new models, AI tools, and architectures, translating relevant breakthroughs into practical, value-driving implementations.
You are a proactive builder who loves turning ambitious ideas into working code. You can break down complex AI concepts and architectures into clear, executable steps. You are genuinely obsessed with the fast-moving AI landscape, constantly experimenting with new models, libraries, and papers. You lead by example and collaboration, upskilling team members through pair programming, code reviews, and pragmatic design discussions.
Requirements:
- Deep AI & Agentic Expertise: Proven hands-on experience building with frameworks like Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Agents SDK, or custom orchestration frameworks. Practical experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool/function calling, structured LLM outputs, and complex RAG pipelines (vector retrieval, hybrid search, embeddings). Experience with evaluation frameworks, prompt engineering, tracing, context window optimization, and compute/token governance in production.
- Production Engineering & Stack: High proficiency in Python (required for AI ecosystem work) paired with strong experience in object-oriented programming. Experience building and scaling backend microservices and REST/OpenAPI endpoints in enterprise cloud environments, specifically Azure. Familiarity with vector databases, relational databases, and event-driven patterns (e.g., Azure Service Bus, Kafka). Comfortable with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD, testing methodologies, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or Bicep).
