AI Engineer Agentic AI Development Location: Canada, US - PST timezone
Base Location: Seattle, WA
Work Arrangement: Hybrid preferred
Experience: 5 8 Years
Employment Type: Contract
Job Summary We are seeking AI Engineers specializing in Agentic AI Development for one of our analytics clients, supporting a strategic AI initiative for a leading specialty retailer.
This is a highly hands-on engineering role focused on designing, building, evaluating, and deploying production-grade agentic AI systems that automate real-world business workflows. The ideal candidate will have strong software engineering fundamentals combined with recent hands-on experience developing agents, multi-agent systems, orchestration workflows, evaluation frameworks, and context-management solutions.
This is a high-visibility engagement requiring engineers who can independently take well-defined requirements through design, development, evaluation, and production deployment.
Key Responsibilities - Design and build production-grade AI agents and multi-agent orchestration systems.
- Develop agent orchestration patterns, multi-agent coordination, tool integrations, and workflows.
- Design and integrate tools used by agents, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) considerations where applicable.
- Build programmatic agent evaluation frameworks covering metrics, offline/online evaluations, and failure-mode analysis.
- Implement context engineering strategies including retrieval, context assembly, memory/state management, and context optimization.
- Design solutions considering token limits, latency, reliability, and LLM cost constraints.
- Develop production-ready code and own delivery across the full SDLC, including deployment.
- Work independently from client-defined requirements while collaborating closely with engineering teams and stakeholders.
- Contribute to engineering standards and GenAI development best practices across the broader team.
Required Skills & Experience Software Engineering
- 5 8 years of overall software engineering experience.
- Strong experience building production-grade applications and owning solutions through deployment.
- Solid understanding of software architecture, APIs, integrations, testing, and production engineering.
Agentic AI / Generative AI
- Recent hands-on experience building and shipping agentic AI systems, ideally within the last 12 months.
- Experience beyond prototypes, POCs, or prompt experimentation; candidates should have built functional agent workflows or production systems.
- Strong understanding of modern foundation models and agentic architecture/design patterns.
- Experience with agent orchestration, tool calling, multi-agent coordination, and MCP concepts.
Agent Evaluation
- Practical experience designing and implementing agent/LLM evaluations.
- Experience with programmatic metrics, offline and online evaluations, and failure-mode analysis.
Context Engineering
- Hands-on experience with retrieval, context assembly, memory, and state management.
- Understanding of context-window, latency, performance, and cost trade-offs in production LLM applications.
Frameworks
- Experience with one or more agentic AI frameworks or SDKs such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Claude Agent SDK, or OpenAI agent development tooling.
- Ability to work framework-agnostically and apply transferable agentic architecture concepts.
Communication
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to operate independently from defined requirements and collaborate effectively with engineering and business stakeholders.
Nice to Have - Hands-on experience with Claude Agent SDK.
- Experience with LLM cost management and optimization.
- Strong stakeholder communication and requirements-translation skills.
- Retail or E-commerce domain experience.
- Experience working with customer journey, transaction, behavioral, or similar retail data.
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