AI Engineer

Southern Company • Birmingham, AL

13d • Hybrid

About The Position

The AI Engineer designs, builds, and evolves AI solutions that deliver measurable business and operational value across Southern Power. The role translates use-case intent into production-ready agents, models, and workflows, following enterprise architecture, governance, and operational standards to ensure solutions are scalable, safe, and suitable for a critical-infrastructure environment.

The position is based at The Energy Center in Birmingham, Alabama, or Ivan Allen in Atlanta, Georgia, with four days in the office and one remote day. It spans AI solution development, end-to-end workflow implementation, responsible AI controls, collaboration across the AI delivery lifecycle, performance and cost optimization, prototyping, and ongoing refinement of agent behavior. The position is part of the company's Insider Threat Program and involves access to or control over sensitive data, systems, or assets. Selection requires enhanced personnel screening, including a background review, drug screen, and psychological assessment.

Requirements

• Experience building AI and machine learning applications in enterprise settings.
• Practical understanding of agentic AI concepts, including planners, tool-calling, memory, and multi-agent collaboration.
• Familiarity with enterprise data platforms and APIs, including structured, unstructured, and document-based data.
• Awareness of AI governance, risk, and compliance considerations in regulated environments.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to decompose complex use cases into modular agent behaviors.
• A product-oriented mindset focused on tangible outcomes rather than experimentation alone.
• Ability to work within defined architectural and governance constraints.
• Clear communication skills, including the ability to explain AI behavior and limitations to non-technical stakeholders.
• Proficiency in Python and AI frameworks for LLMs and agents.
• Experience with prompt engineering, evaluation techniques, and structured outputs.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns.
• Working knowledge of API integration and tool execution within agent workflows.
• Exposure to CI/CD, model deployment, and observability concepts sufficient to operate within pipelines.
• Willingness to undergo enhanced personnel screening, including a background review, drug screen, and psychological assessment, if selected.

Nice To Haves

• Proficiency with Databricks.

Responsibilities

• Develop AI solutions by building and configuring agents that reason, plan, and act using models, tools, and enterprise data, aligned with approved patterns.
• Implement use-case workflows end-to-end, translating business and operational requirements into workflows spanning data ingestion, inference, tool execution, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Apply responsible AI guardrails by embedding safety controls, validation steps, and explainability mechanisms into agent logic and prompts.
• Collaborate across the AI delivery lifecycle, partnering with architects on design decisions and with ML Ops on deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Optimize performance and cost by tuning prompts, models, and agent interactions to improve accuracy, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Support experimentation to production by rapidly prototyping AI capabilities while adhering to standards for enterprise-grade deployments.
• Continuously improve agent behavior using feedback, evaluations, and operational signals to refine performance and reliability.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary.
• Annual incentive awards for eligible employees.
• Health, welfare, and retirement benefits designed to support physical, financial, and emotional/social well-being.
• The position may be eligible for additional compensation, such as an incentive program, subject to the applicable plan terms.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed