AI Software Engineer

State of Oklahoma • Oklahoma City, OK

1d • Onsite

About The Position

The AI Software Engineer owns the agency’s custom AI development on Microsoft Foundry. The role turns AI delivery from one-off projects into a repeatable, industrialized pattern that supports faster delivery and lower cost per solution. The engineer takes ownership of AI products already in production, stabilizes and hardens them, and extracts reusable capabilities so future solutions can be built from proven components.

The position supports the Information Services Division and is full-time, 40 hours per week. It is an on-site role in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The position includes participation in an on-call rotation for production AI services, with occasional after-hours support. The work is primarily in an office setting using a computer for a large percentage of the workday; the noise level is usually moderate, and occasional travel may be required.

OMES provides leave including 15 vacation days, 15 sick leave days, and 11 paid holidays annually, as well as a comprehensive benefits package with a benefit allowance to offset insurance premiums for employees and eligible dependents. Salary is based on education and experience.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, and 6+ years of professional software development experience building and supporting production applications, plus 2+ years developing generative AI or LLM-based solutions in production, including RAG and/or agent-based architectures; equivalent combinations of education and experience are accepted.
• Ability to own, stabilize, harden, and support production AI products.
• Experience developing reusable software components and repeatable AI delivery patterns.
• Experience with production AI solution security, testing, evaluation, observability, and operational support.
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation and provide occasional after-hours production support.

Nice To Haves

• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI App and Agent Developer Associate (AI-103), predecessor Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102), or Azure Developer or DevOps Engineer certifications.
• Experience with Foundry Agent Service, Semantic Kernel / Microsoft Agent Framework, multi-agent orchestration, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) tooling.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks, LLMOps practices, and prompt/version management.
• Background in public sector, regulated industries, or environments with strict security and compliance requirements.
• Experience with FinOps or IT cost management for cloud and AI workloads.
• Familiarity with Power Platform, Copilot Studio, or Microsoft 365 integration.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain a reference architecture for AI solutions on Microsoft Foundry, including Foundry Agent Service, Foundry Models, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Search / Foundry IQ grounding.
• Build reusable starter templates, shared SDKs and libraries, and infrastructure-as-code modules to accelerate delivery of new use cases.
• Standardize shared components such as prompt and agent configuration, RAG pipelines, tool/API connectors, model routing, conversation state, and error handling.
• Define and refine a repeatable intake-to-production lifecycle covering discovery, prototyping, evaluation, security review, deployment, and support handoff.
• Identify duplicated logic, refactor it into shared capabilities, and retire one-off code where possible.
• Track and optimize token consumption, model selection, compute, hosting costs, and overall unit economics.
• Take technical ownership of existing production AI products and assess their architecture, code quality, security, dependencies, and technical debt.
• Develop and carry out a code-hardening plan that includes automated tests, static and dependency scanning, secrets management, resiliency and retry patterns, and rate-limit and quota handling.
• Migrate inherited products onto shared capabilities and standard pipelines as they mature.
• Implement automated AI evaluation for groundedness, relevance, accuracy, and safety as release gates, and maintain product regression test sets.
• Deliver enhancements and features from a prioritized backlog with product owners and business stakeholders.
• Support production AI products through an on-call rotation and incident response.
• Instrument products with telemetry, tracing, and dashboards for latency, error rates, cost, and model quality.
• Define service level objectives with stakeholders and monitor model and prompt drift, degradation, and anomalous usage.
• Perform root cause analysis, write post-incident reviews, and incorporate corrective actions into the shared platform.
• Manage model version lifecycles, deprecations, and upgrades while minimizing disruption to users.
• Apply secure-by-design practices, including managed identities, least-privilege RBAC, private networking, key and secrets management, and data protection appropriate for government data.
• Implement content safety, prompt-injection defenses, input/output filtering, and human-in-the-loop controls where required.
• Support AI governance, documentation, and audit requirements, including model cards, data lineage, risk assessments, and records retention.
• Ensure solutions meet applicable state policy, privacy, accessibility, and security standards, including WCAG / Section 508.
• Work within an agile delivery model alongside DevSecOps, SRE, Observability, infrastructure, security, and data teams.
• Produce architecture documentation, runbooks, and developer guides to support adoption by other engineers and vendors.
• Coach developers and contractors on the standard pattern, perform code reviews, and enforce engineering standards.
• Translate business problems into technical approaches and communicate trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and leadership.

Benefits

• 15 days of vacation annually.
• 15 days of sick leave annually.
• 11 paid holidays annually.
• Comprehensive benefits package with a benefit allowance to offset insurance premiums for employees and eligible dependents.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior