Remote job
AI Engineer Lead (Contractor)
Job details
About this role
Role overview
A hands-on AI engineering lead is needed on a contract engagement to design and ship LLM-powered systems end to end. Roughly 70% of the time is spent building, with the remaining 30% focused on technical direction, code and design review, and mentoring a small remote team.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end design of LLM-powered features, agents, and data pipelines, from prompting and retrieval through evaluation and production deployment - Build reliable backend services and APIs that wrap model behavior, including rate limiting and authentication - Define evaluation methodology, guardrails, and reliability practices around production AI features - Review AI and ML work and pair with engineers to lift implementation quality - Make pragmatic engineering trade-offs that turn vague business goals into shipped, evaluated systems
Requirements
- Six or more years of relevant engineering experience - Strong software engineering background; not solely a data science or research profile - Production experience with LLMs, including prompt design, retrieval, agents, and evaluation - Python and FastAPI (or comparable) for backend services - React, Next.js, and TypeScript for frontend surfaces - PostgreSQL, including schema design and query optimization - Background in API design, authentication and authorization, and rate limiting - Comfort with cloud platforms, ideally Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, GCS); equivalent AWS or Azure experience welcome - Familiarity with inference and serving tooling such as vLLM, Ollama, or TGI, including quantization and batching - Working knowledge of Docker, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, and Terraform - Observability experience with tools like Grafana or Datadog - Comfort using AI coding assistants such as Cursor, Claude Code, or GitHub Copilot
Nice to have
- Experience supporting distributed remote teams across time zones - Interest in shaping evaluation methodology and production guardrails for AI products
Benefits and work setup
- Initial three-month contract with strong potential to extend by six or more months based on performance - Fully remote - Immediate start