Senior AI Engineer

Western Governors University • Raleigh, NC

2d • $161,000 - $249,500 • Onsite

About The Position

Join WGU’s AI Engineering Enablement team and play a pivotal role in shaping the next generation of intelligent, scalable systems. As a Senior AI Engineer, you will lead the design and delivery of complex AI solutions that directly impact innovation across the organization. You’ll act as a technical anchor for the team, driving architecture, reliability, and excellence in production AI systems while mentoring others and influencing long-term technical direction.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data science, or machine learning.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based applications or AI systems in production.
• Strong experience building and deploying production LLM-powered applications using major APIs and/or open-source models
• Deep knowledge of agentic AI systems including tool use, memory architectures, and multi-agent coordination
• Advanced expertise in RAG pipeline design, embedding strategies, and retrieval optimization
• Experience designing scalable evaluation frameworks, including automated testing and quality measurement
• Proficiency in Python and strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design and CI/CD practices
• Experience with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, or equivalent) in production contexts.
• Ability to lead complex technical discussions, mentor others, and operate effectively in fast-moving environments

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Databricks or related certifications
• Experience with open-source model ecosystems (Hugging Face, Ollama, vLLM) and self-hosted inference infrastructure.
• Experience with AWS and cloud-native AI infrastructure
• Background in EdTech, personalized learning, or student-facing AI applications

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end design and delivery of production LLM-powered applications and multi-agent systems from architecture through deployment and monitoring
• Own and evolve critical AI infrastructure, ensuring reliability, scalability, and observability standards
• Architect and optimize advanced RAG pipelines, including hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, and multi-index strategies
• Design and implement AI evaluation frameworks, including automated regression testing, LLM-as-judge workflows, and red-teaming protocols
• Drive prompt engineering strategy for complex multi-turn and multi-agent interactions, including governance and versioning practices
• Lead model fine-tuning and adaptation initiatives using techniques such as LoRA, PEFT, and RLHF
• Mentor AI engineers and elevate team standards through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance

Benefits

• bonuses
• medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare
• health savings account and flexible spending account
• basic and voluntary life insurance
• disability coverage
• accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages
• legal and identity theft coverage
• retirement savings plan
• wellbeing program
• discounted WGU tuition
• flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual
• flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual
• 11 paid holidays
• other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave

What This Job Offers

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