7+ years professional experience as an Engineer with at least 1+ years of hands-on experience building agentic systems on at least one modern stack (LangGraph, the Anthropic SDK / Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Pydantic-AI, Mastra, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, or a homegrown stack). We care that you have built and operated agentic systems in production, not which framework.
Strong Python familiarity plus one typed language for production services (TypeScript, Go, or similar). Cloud experience (AWS or GCP) and containerized deployment.
Software engineering foundation (formal or autodidact), with several years of production environment experience and a track record of leading systems to launch.
Multiple shipped LLM-powered features in a production environment, with concrete stories about what broke, how you fixed it, and what you would do differently.
Practical knowledge of common agentic patterns: ReAct, tool use with structured schemas, prompt chaining, routing, orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer / reflection, and human-in-the-loop. You can decide when a deterministic workflow is the right answer instead of an autonomous agent.
Hands-on experience in a production environment with retrieval: chunking, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, metadata filtering, and the failure modes of each. Working knowledge of grounding techniques that anchor generated answers in retrieved evidence (citation and quote extraction, faithfulness and refusal evals, post-hoc consistency checks).
Strong prompt-engineering practice: zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot patterns; example selection and ordering; in-context learning and chain-of-thought.
Comfort with structured output and validation in production (provider-native structured outputs, Instructor, Pydantic-AI, Outlines, or a comparable approach).
Disciplined evaluation practice. You do not rely on subjective review to decide whether a system is ready.
Experience in standing up local models and creating and testing closed local model solutions.
Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain an architectural trade-off to an executive and to a junior engineer in the same week.
You are comfortable using AI coding tools heavily in your implementation workflow while you own problem framing, design choices, and verification. We measure your output by working systems delivered, not lines of code written.
Nice to Have
Advanced retrieval experience: GraphRAG, agentic retrieval, evaluation-driven retrieval tuning, and hybrid retrieval at scale.
Direct or transferable experience with safety, privacy, and policy constraints in user-facing AI. K-12 or other regulated-domain experience is a strong plus.
Experience with prompt-optimization frameworks (DSPy, TEXTGRAD, AdalFlow) where they paid off in production.
A public repo, package, gist, or technical write-up of meaningful AI work, or a representative project you can describe in detail under your confidentiality constraints.
Open-source contributions to AI tooling (frameworks, agents, evals, MCP servers).
