Software Engineer - AI Agent Development

Contract Software Engineer - AI Agent Development

Engagement Type: 3+ Months Contract Extendable

Location: On-site, Santa Clara, CA

Overview

seeking an experienced contract software engineer to design and build AI agents that support device onboarding and continuous environment monitoring for data center infrastructure. The engagement is an initial 3-month term with the possibility of extension based on delivery.

The agents will be built on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and must be production-grade from the start. This is applied AI engineering work, not research. The contractor will be expected to deliver agents that operate reliably against real device data, integrate cleanly with existing platform services, and are structured so that other engineers can extend and maintain them.

What You Will Build

• The first area of work is automated device onboarding. The agents will handle the discovery and registration of new devices into the platform, reducing the manual effort currently required to bring physical equipment under management. This includes identifying device types, extracting configuration, and populating the platform with accurate asset records without requiring hand-holding from operations staff.
• The second area is continuous environment monitoring. The agents will detect changes to the physical data center environment and keep the platform's representation of that environment consistent with physical reality. When equipment is added, removed, reconfigured, or behaves unexpectedly, the agents are responsible for surfacing that and driving reconciliation. Accuracy and timeliness of the digital representation is the success metric.
• Both workstreams require the agents to communicate directly with physical devices using the protocols those devices speak.

Required Qualifications

• 8 or more years of professional software engineering experience, with a demonstrated record of delivering production systems.
• Deep expertise in software design and architecture. This role involves substantial use of AI-assisted development tooling, and success depends on the ability to produce precise, unambiguous specifications that can be implemented reliably and verified against clear acceptance criteria.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents or agentic workflows in production environments, including tool use, state management, and reliable execution under real-world conditions.
• Practical experience with Microsoft Azure AI Foundry or a directly comparable enterpriseAI platform for building and deploying agent-based services.
• Strong Python development skills. Agent services will be built primarily in Python and must be well-structured for extensibility and long-term maintainability.
• Demonstrated experience working with industrial device protocols, specifically Modbus, BACnet, and OPC-UA. The contractor must be able to build agent integrations that communicate with physical devices accurately and reliably.
• Experience working with digital twin concepts or asset registry systems, including the challenges of keeping a software representation of a physical environment consistent overtime.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with additional OT protocols such as MQTT/Sparkplug-B or DNP3.
• Background in data center infrastructure, facilities management systems, or DCIM platforms.
• Familiarity with automated device discovery and configuration extraction across heterogeneous hardware environments.
• Experience designing agentic systems that operate with human-in-the-loop approval workflows in safety-sensitive or operationally critical contexts.