Staff AI Platform Engineer

Abbott • Chicago, IL

10h • Onsite

About The Position

Abbott is hiring a senior individual-contributor engineer to drive architecture and delivery for significant portions of its enterprise AI Platform. The role sets technical direction for one or more platform capability areas, partners with the Tech Lead/Architect on reference architecture decisions, and serves as a primary technical escalation point for consuming teams. It operates with substantial autonomy and is expected to raise the technical bar for the team.

The engineer will lead design and implementation across capabilities such as a multi-provider model gateway, GenAI runtime, agent/model registries, and evaluation and tracing pipelines. The role also owns platform observability, responsible-AI and security controls, reliability engineering, technical standards, and vendor/build-versus-buy recommendations. It includes mentoring engineers and working with the Product Manager and senior stakeholders across AI/Agentic Engineering, Applied Data Science, and security. This is an onsite role at Abbott locations in Illinois; it is not remote. Travel is 10% of the time.

Requirements

• 8–10 years of software engineering, platform engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure experience, with a track record of owning significant technical scope.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise AI/GenAI platforms, or comparable developer, data, or ML platforms, in production at scale.
• Strong software engineering ability in Python and at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Java, including distributed systems, API design, testing, and secure SDLC.
• Deep technical understanding of at least two of the following: model gateways, GenAI runtimes, RAG, agent/model registries, evaluation, observability/tracing, guardrails, or platform governance.
• Experience with containers and orchestration (such as Kubernetes), infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cloud services, and production SLO/on-call practices, including leading incident response.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent professional experience.
• Ability to drive technical decisions with significant autonomy, influence engineers outside a direct reporting line, and communicate clearly with technical leadership.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building enterprise GenAI or agent platforms using capabilities such as multi-model routing, agent registries, prompt management, evaluation harnesses, and GenAI tracing.
• Experience in a highly regulated environment such as health tech, med-tech, or life sciences, with GxP, HIPAA, validation, and change-control constraints.
• Experience implementing security, responsible-AI, privacy, policy, or cost/FinOps controls for shared AI infrastructure.
• Experience with open standards and tooling such as MCP, OpenTelemetry, and Kubernetes, and cloud-native platform engineering practices.
• Prior informal technical leadership or mentoring experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead design of major platform capabilities, such as a multi-provider model gateway, GenAI runtime, agent/model registries, and evaluation and tracing pipelines, with minimal oversight and in partnership with the Tech Lead/Architect.
• Make and document architecture decisions and tradeoffs for the platform control plane, paved-road SDKs, and developer experience, balancing scalability, security, cost, and operability.
• Drive platform observability and evaluation strategy, including distributed tracing and quality, drift, latency, and cost signals, and establish standards for other engineers.
• Lead implementation of security, guardrails, and responsible-AI controls, including PII/PHI handling, prompt-injection defenses, identity-on-behalf-of, and policy enforcement across platform services.
• Own platform reliability engineering by defining SLOs, leading incident response for high-severity issues, driving root-cause analysis, and improving resilience.
• Set engineering standards through architecture reviews, design documents, and code reviews; identify and resolve systemic technical risks before they block delivery.
• Make build-versus-buy and vendor recommendations with cost and tradeoff analysis in partnership with the Tech Lead/Architect and Product Manager.
• Mentor and technically develop mid-level and junior engineers; act as a technical lead on cross-team initiatives without formal people-management responsibility.
• Partner with the Product Manager, AI Platform, to sequence the roadmap and engage senior stakeholders across AI/Agentic Engineering, Applied Data Science, and security on feasibility and design.

Benefits

• Career development opportunities with an international company.
• Employees can qualify for free medical coverage in the Health Investment Plan (HIP) PPO medical plan in the next calendar year.
• Retirement savings plan with a high employer contribution.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Freedom 2 Save student debt program.
• FreeU education benefit, an affordable and convenient path to a bachelor's degree.
• Health and wellness benefits.

What This Job Offers

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