Senior AI Engineer

AllianceBernstein•Nashville, TN

28d•Onsite

About The Position

The Senior AI Engineer works with the Data Engineering team under the Center of Excellence (Data Science). This role operates at the intersection of AI engineering, data engineering, agentic AI, platform engineering, and investment technology. It emphasizes Python, enterprise integration, reliable data products, security, CI/CD, observability, model and agent evaluation, and rigorous validation of production AI systems. We are building a next-generation enterprise AI and data platform that enables teams to design, deploy, integrate, and scale intelligent applications and agents across investment research, portfolio management, risk, client, and operational workflows. The platform provides standardized infrastructure, reliable data products, commercial and self-hosted model access, retrieval, agent orchestration, evaluation, observability, security, and governance. It enables teams to rapidly deliver AI-powered capabilities in a scalable, secure, and production-ready manner.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in software, data, AI, or platform engineering.
Strong production development experience with Python and SQL.
Proven ability to build and operate AI applications, data pipelines, APIs, data products, and distributed systems.
Experience integrating AI capabilities into enterprise applications and business workflows.
Strong understanding of: Object-oriented and asynchronous Python
APIs, microservices, and application integration
Data modeling, contracts, quality, reconciliation, metadata, and lineage
Batch, streaming, event-driven, and API-based architectures
Workflow orchestration, distributed processing, and production operations
Experience with cloud data and AI platforms such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake.
Ability to design scalable, reusable, resilient, and operationally supportable services.
Hands-on experience with: Large language models, embeddings, prompt engineering, context engineering, and RAG architecture.
Commercial and open-source model APIs and ecosystems.
AI agents, agentic workflows, reusable skills, tool calling, structured outputs, and multi-step orchestration.
Vector, keyword, metadata-filtered, graph-based, and hybrid retrieval.
Agent frameworks such as LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, Pydantic AI, or equivalent platforms.
Experience with one or more of the following: Azure OpenAI, OpenAI APIs, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or Vertex AI.
Hugging Face, vLLM, Ollama, Qwen, or other approved open-source model technologies.
Containerized model deployment and GPU-based inference.
Model serving, API gateways, quantization, memory optimization, and model configuration.
Context-window, token, concurrency, batching, throughput, and caching optimization.
Benchmarking and monitoring model quality, latency, availability, resource utilization, and cost.
Strong experience with: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated provisioning, and governed deployment.
API-first and microservices architectures.
Docker, Kubernetes, AKS, GKE, or equivalent container platforms.
Authentication, authorization, secrets management, OAuth, managed identities, RBAC, and Microsoft Entra ID or equivalent technologies.
Repository governance, branch protection, pull-request validation, dependency controls, and software supply-chain security.
Metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, monitoring, and alerting.
Designing observable, resilient, secure, and production-ready AI systems.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, or comparable tools for: Code generation, refactoring, debugging, testing, and documentation.
Data-pipeline, infrastructure, and CI/CD development.
Codebase understanding, modernization, architecture extraction, and pull-request review.
Governed development supported by automated testing, peer review, security scanning, and controlled deployment.
Candidates must be able to independently validate AI-generated code for: Functional correctness and test coverage
Security and data-access risks
Performance and scalability
Maintainability and architectural alignment
Dependency, licensing, and software supply-chain concerns
Compliance with enterprise engineering standards
Hands-on experience with data-quality, model-evaluation, LLM-evaluation, or AI-observability frameworks.
Experience building: Model benchmarking and evaluation pipelines
Data-quality and reconciliation tests
Retrieval and RAG evaluations
Agent test harnesses and scenario-based simulations
Continuous validation and regression testing
Production monitoring for data, retrieval, model, and agent quality
Ability to measure: Data accuracy, completeness, freshness, and consistency
Retrieval relevance and coverage
Groundedness, factual consistency, citations, and provenance
Tool selection, execution, and structured-output compliance
Agent workflow success, failure, and escalation behavior
Latency, throughput, reliability, resource utilization, and cost
Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, OpenInference, Datadog, Arize, LangSmith, MLflow, Microsoft Foundry evaluation capabilities, or equivalent tools.
Ability to use evaluation results to inform model selection, routing, release, rollback, and production-readiness decisions.

Nice To Haves

MCP servers and clients, agent-to-agent communication, and enterprise search.
Semantic layers, ontologies, and knowledge graphs.
Agent memory, state management, and human-in-the-loop controls.
Document intelligence and multimodal processing.
Reusable agent tools, skills, manifests, and registration standards.

Responsibilities

Build reliable, reusable, and AI-ready data products for investment and enterprise use cases.
Design and develop production-grade AI applications, agents, and intelligent workflows using Python.
Implement agent orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, memory, and multi-step workflows.
Integrate AI capabilities into enterprise applications, data platforms, and business systems.
Contribute to the shared AI and data platform that powers these capabilities at scale.