Sr. AI Engineer

Farmer's Business Network•Chicago, IL

16h

About The Position

Farmers Business Network (FBN) is hiring a Sr. AI Engineer to own its portfolio of customer-facing AI agents for support, lending, sales, and orders. The role covers the end-to-end lifecycle: designing, building, evaluating, launching, and operating agents that help farmers receive fast, accurate answers and place orders while allowing staff to focus on work requiring human judgment. The engineer owns agent architecture, tool and data access, evaluation criteria, and launch readiness; business owners approve what the agents may say and do. The work has company-wide impact and supports FBN’s FY27 AI plan for Direct, CX, and Lending. The role also sets practices for building and evaluating customer-facing agents and mentors other engineers and business champions. The position includes moving the customer experience agent from an internal staff copilot to a member-facing agent; automating loan operations within nCino on Salesforce; building agents for routine sales and order interactions; and establishing evaluation, safety, monitoring, and incident-response practices. The expected allocation is approximately 40% customer support, 25% lending, 20% sales and orders, and 15% evaluation, safety, and operations. The stated US national average base salary range is $220,000–$245,000, with variation possible by geography and metropolitan labor costs. FBN offers full-time/permanent employees total compensation that may include equity compensation depending on job level and incentive or bonus plans depending on position. Benefits include paid holidays plus an additional floating holiday, paid time off, remote work if eligible, parental leave, medical, dental, vision, wellbeing, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, a 401(k), and employer HSA contributions. FBN is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field and 8+ years of software engineering experience, or 12+ years of related experience.
Experience shipping LLM-based agents or assistants to real users in production, including tool use, retrieval, and multi-step workflows.
Experience building evaluation suites and using them to inform launches, including offline test sets based on real data, online monitoring, and regression checks.
Strong backend engineering skills in Python or TypeScript, including APIs, queues, data pipelines, and AWS cloud.
Experience integrating with business systems such as CRM, ERP, telephony, or messaging platforms, with attention to authentication, permissions, and audit trails.
Sound judgment about agent safety, including when an agent should act, draft, or hand off to a person.
Ability to work directly with non-technical business owners and turn unclear customer problems into scoped agents with success criteria.

Nice To Haves

Customer support automation, contact center, or conversational AI experience.
Experience with lending, fintech, or regulated workflows such as document processing, KYC, or credit policy.
Experience with Salesforce, nCino, NetSuite, or Dialpad APIs.
SQL experience on a data warehouse such as Redshift.
Agriculture, marketplace, or e-commerce background.

Responsibilities

Own the customer-facing agent portfolio end to end, including design, development, evaluations, launch, and ongoing operations.
Move the customer experience agent from a staff copilot to a member-facing agent that answers questions about order status, invoices, returns, and products, including off-hours coverage.
Work with the CX lead to determine which customer-support replies agents may send independently and build handoffs to people for other cases.
Automate lending operations by reading, sorting, and filing loan documents; spreading borrower financial statements; following up on conditions to close; and contacting new land-loan leads promptly.
Build lending agents that operate within the nCino on Salesforce loan origination system and its controls.
Build sales and order agents that process routine and repeat orders, follow up on stalled carts and quotes, return missed sales calls, and send SMS outreach that hands warm leads to sales representatives.
Build evaluation suites using real cases, including mined support cases and calls; measure accuracy, safety, latency, and business outcomes.
Set guardrails, monitoring, and incident response for agents acting on FBN’s behalf with customers.
Own decisions about agent architecture, tool and data access, evaluation criteria, and launch readiness.
Work with business owners, who approve what agents may say and do.
Mentor other engineers and business champions and establish standard practices for building and evaluating customer-facing agents.