Software Developer (Emerging Careers)

SAS • Cary, NC

12d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Platform Products division is looking for a Software Developer (Emerging Careers) specialized in Generative AI to join the engineering team driving SAS Retrieval Agent Manager. In this role, you will help build and scale cutting-edge, enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and autonomous agent architectures. You will play a pivotal role in integrating SAS VIYA agentic technologies with vectorized customer document data, ensuring our LLM-driven solutions are secure, high-performing, and highly scalable. This is an opportunity to directly shape how enterprise customers deploy GenAI at scale by engineering the production-grade infrastructure and guardrails that let sophisticated agentic systems run reliably and respond accurately in mission critical environments.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related technical field
• Minimum 2 years of experience in software development
• Production-level Python development experience with a deep understanding of object-oriented design patterns, memory optimization, and asynchronous programming.
• Hands-on experience building complex, stateful applications using LangChain or similar orchestrators.
• Hands-on experience developing and integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and clients to expose tools, data sources, and APIs for consumption by LLM-driven agents in production environments.
• Experience deploying LLM-as-a-judge or empirical evaluation tooling (e.g., Ragas, TruLens, MLflow) to bench and score generative outputs.
• Practical experience creating, deploying, and managing containerized cloud workloads using Docker or Kubernetes.
• Proficiency with version control (git, GitHub workflows, branching strategies, and rigorous code reviews).
• Equivalent combination of related education, training and experience may be considered in place of the above qualifications.

Nice To Haves

• Adaptability: Approaches architectural shifts and evolving GenAI trends with a growth mindset, treating rapid technological changes as opportunities for innovation.
• Collaborating: Actively seeks input from cross-functional teams, leveraging collective engineering strengths to solve complex data and orchestration challenges.
• Communication: Translates complex AI concepts and metric evaluation data into clear, actionable technical insights for both technical stakeholders and product management.
• Quality Orientation: Demonstrates a vigilant commitment to minimizing hallucination, optimization bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities in production GenAI deployments.
• Experience working directly with vector databases, embeddings, and complex document parsing methodologies.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and ideally their AI services e.g. Azure Open AI.
• Experience implementing safety, alignment, or content-filtering layers (e.g., NeMo Guardrails, Guardrails AI) within LLM pipelines.
• Experience with CI/CD deployment automation tools like GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Exposure to project management frameworks and tracking tools like Jira for task tracking, sprint planning and collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate on the ingestion, processing, and management of vectorized customer document data to optimize retrieval accuracy, latency, and agentic integrations.
• Maintain accountability for the entire lifecycle of the code, from translation of product requirements into actionable features, to rigorous testing (functional, unit, and performance), code reviews, and post-deployment support.
• Design, develop, and maintain autonomous agent architectures and RAG pipelines using LangChain to interface seamlessly with SAS VIYA offerings.
• Integrate rigorous LLM defensive frameworks and operational Guardrails to ensure safe, compliant, and deterministic model behaviors across enterprise data.
• Build and execute systematic validation frameworks to quantify LLM performance, tracking key metrics (such as context recall, faithfulness, and answer relevance) to ensure the highest output quality.
• Embrace curiosity, passion, authenticity and accountability. These are our values and influence everything we do.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
• PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
• HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
• Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) that’s free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There's a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
• An industry-leading 401k plan.
• Tuition Assistance Program and programs and resources to support your development
• Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
• Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
• Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees.

What This Job Offers

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