Lead Python AI Engineer

About the Company Our client is a global technology and digital engineering organization that partners with leading businesses to design, develop, and deliver innovative technology solutions. With a strong focus on cloud engineering, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation, the company helps organizations solve complex technical challenges and build scalable, future-ready platforms. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Lead Python AI Engineer to design and build scalable, AI-powered backend services, APIs, and intelligent agentic workflows. In this role, you will bridge traditional backend engineering with modern AI technologies, integrating Large Language Models (LLMs), vector databases, and external tools into secure, reliable, production-grade systems. The ideal candidate combines strong Python and distributed systems expertise with hands-on experience in LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic AI frameworks. Key Responsibilities Design, develop, and maintain scalable backend API services and advanced LLM orchestration layers. Take end-to-end ownership of API contracts, service reliability, performance, and graceful failure handling. Build and optimize RAG pipelines, including document ingestion, chunking, embeddings, and retrieval strategies. Develop reusable agentic workflows and orchestration frameworks using tools such as LangChain, LangGraph, and LlamaIndex. Integrate LLMs with internal systems, vector databases, and external tools. Implement AI evaluation, monitoring, observability, fallback mechanisms, and cost optimization strategies. Ensure enterprise-grade security, data privacy, authentication, and comprehensive testing across backend services. Contribute to technical architecture, engineering standards, and best practices. Collaborate with frontend, data engineering, and infrastructure teams to deliver scalable AI solutions. Required Skills & Experience 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong expertise in Python, microservices, and distributed systems. Proven experience designing and developing scalable, cloud-native APIs and backend services. Hands-on experience with AWS, Docker, ECS/EKS, and RESTful APIs. 1-2+ years of production experience integrating AI SDKs such as OpenAI, Anthropic/Claude, AWS Bedrock, or similar technologies. Practical experience with agentic AI frameworks, including LangChain, LangGraph, or LlamaIndex. Experience developing and optimizing RAG pipelines, vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval systems. Familiarity with vector search technologies such as Amazon Kendra or OpenSearch. Understanding of AI observability and evaluation tools such as LangSmith, Langfuse, or Arize. Strong knowledge of secure coding practices, authentication, authorization, and API security. Ability to design reliable, maintainable, and production-ready AI applications. Nice to Have Experience with React and TypeScript. Experience deploying and scaling applications within AWS EKS environments. Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent interoperability. Understanding of Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). Additional programming experience with Java, Node.js, or Go. Why Consider This Opportunity? This is an opportunity to work on advanced AI engineering initiatives, building intelligent systems that go beyond experimentation and into real-world production environments. You will have the opportunity to influence technical architecture, develop reusable AI frameworks, and collaborate with experienced engineering teams on complex, large-scale technology solutions. If you are a hands-on Python engineer with a passion for building reliable, scalable AI systems, we'd love to hear from you. Salt is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.