Senior AI Developer

Job Title: Senior AI Developer

Location: Charlotte, NC, 28262

Work Arrangement: Hybrid

Contract Duration: 12 Months with possible extension 

Pay 76

Job Overview

We are seeking an experienced Software Engineer – Generative AI / LLM to join a leading global financial services organization in Charlotte, NC. This is an exciting long-term contract opportunity for a highly skilled engineer with strong experience building and productionizing Generative AI, LLM, RAG, and agentic applications.

The ideal candidate will have deep hands-on expertise with LangChain, LangGraph, Google Vertex AI, RAG pipelines, vector databases, Python, and cloud-native application development. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to transform complex and ambiguous requirements into scalable, secure, and production-ready AI solutions.

Required Skills & Experience

• 7–10+ years of software engineering experience, or equivalent experience through work, consulting, education, training, or military service.
• 3–5+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying Machine Learning / Generative AI solutions in production.
• Expert-level experience with LangChain and LangGraph, including tools, agents, state graphs, retries, subgraphs, memory, and observability.
• Strong hands-on experience with Google Vertex AI, including foundational models, endpoints, pipelines, Model Garden, Vector Search, IAM, and service architectures.
• Deep expertise in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), including:
• • Chunking strategies
  • Embeddings
  • Hybrid retrieval
  • Dense and keyword/BM25 search
  • Reranking
  • Retrieval evaluation
• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, or FAISS.
• Experience with embedding models such as OpenAI, Vertex AI, Cohere, or BGE.
• Strong backend development experience with Python/FastAPI or Node.js/Express.
• Experience developing modern front-end applications using React and/or Next.js.
• Strong cloud experience, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP); AWS or Azure experience is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes/GKE, and CI/CD.
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions and Cloud Build.
• Strong understanding of Generative AI evaluation, including RAGAS, G-Eval, rubric-based evaluation, A/B testing, and human-in-the-loop evaluation.
• Experience with AI observability and tracing tools such as LangSmith, LlamaIndex observability, and OpenTelemetry.
• Understanding of prompt management, prompt/version tracking, and model lifecycle management.
• Strong knowledge of AI security and governance, including:
• • PII handling and masking
  • Data isolation and residency
  • Prompt injection defenses
  • Secret management
  • Audit logging
  • Access controls
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with the ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into production-ready solutions.

Nice to Have
Knowledge graphs (RDF/OWL), retrieval planning, and tool former/agent patterns.
LLM serving and routing (DG/mixture?of? experts, function/tool calling, Guardrails, Instructor schemas, Pydantic).
LlamaIndex experience; structured RAG (SQL/Graph RAG); function/tool calling integrations (Databases, SaaS).