AI Engineer

NCS Pte Ltd; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

NCS Pte Ltd in Hong Kong seeks an experienced AI Engineer to design, build, and operate production-grade MAS and GenAI systems end-to-end. You will ship robust APIs, reusable components, and secure pipelines that connect LLMs, tools, and enterprise data across platforms.

The ideal candidate brings 6+ years in software, strong systems language skills, hands-on with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud, plus practical LLM experience in RAG, prompts, and safety patterns.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in software engineering with production services and leading small projects.
• Strong in at least one systems language (Python/TypeScript/Go/Java) and a second language.
• Hands-on with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, and cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Practical LLM experience: building RAG/agent apps, prompt design, tool usage, and safety patterns.
• Data design: schemas, batch/stream pipelines, and vector search indexes.
• Testing mindset: unit/integration tests and load tests.
• Security basics: secrets management, IAM, and security scanning.

Responsibilities

• Design multi-agent systems with planning, tool-use, and delegation.
• Expose MAS via REST/gRPC APIs and multiple languages (FastAPI/Express/Java/Go).
• Implement tool adapters with strict contracts and safe sandboxes.
• Build model gateway integrations with routing, rate-limits, retries, and fallbacks.
• Stand up RAG services: embeddings, indexing, and vector search.
• Create ingestion pipelines for docs, tickets, chat, and ERP/CRM data.
• Optimize retrieval quality with evaluation, A/B tests, and tuning.
• Package services as containers and deploy to Kubernetes with Argo CD.
• Implement policy chains and guardrails for security and compliance.
• Ship connectors for SAP/CRM/ITSM and Kafka topics.
• Mentor engineers, define SLAs/SLOs, and foster AI-as-software practices.

Skills

Software engineering

Leadership

Containers & orchestration

CI/CD, IaC & cloud

LLM / AI tooling

Data modeling & pipelines

Testing & reliability

Security basics

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Argo CD

OpenTelemetry

Job description

NCS is a leading AI Tech Services company. With a 15,000-strong team across the Asia Pacific, NCS scales its platforms and capabilities to provide clients with greater agility and AI expertise across a range of Industries. Embracing a strong ecosystem of global partners, NCS transforms technology services delivery combining AI with digital resilience to drive real business impact. NCS is a subsidiary of the Singtel Group.

As an AI Engineer, you will design, build, and operate production-grade agentic and GenAI systems - end to end. You’ll ship services (not just notebooks): robust APIs, reusable components, and secure pipelines that connect LLMs, tools, knowledge, and enterprise systems. You’ll pair strong software engineering with modern AI practices (RAG, agent orchestration, policy chains, evals) to deliver measurable business outcomes at scale.

What will you do?

Agent & Application Engineering

• Design multi-agent systems (MAS) with planning, tool-use, and delegation
• (e.g., LangGraph/Semantic Kernel); expose them via REST/gRPC APIs
• (FastAPI/Express/Java/Go).
• Implement tool adapters (SQL, search, document stores, web calls, code exec) with strict type contracts and safe sandboxes.
• Build model gateway integrations (OpenAI/Azure OpenAI/Bedrock/Vertex; self-hosted vLLM/TGI) with routing, rate-limits, retries, and fallback chains.

Retrieval, Data & Knowledge

• Stand up RAG services: chunking, enrichment, embeddings, indexing, hybrid/vector search (pgvector/Pinecone/Weaviate; OpenSearch/Azure AI Search).
• Implement ingestion pipelines (Airflow/Prefect/Celery/Ray) for docs, tickets, chat, and ERP/CRM data; handle PII redaction and metadata governance.
• Optimize retrieval quality (chunking strategies, re-rankers, query rewriting) with offline/online evaluation and A/B tests.

Quality, Testing & Evaluation

• Treat prompts and graphs as code: version, diff, and test them (unit tests for prompts/tools; golden sets; regression suites).
• Build evaluation harnesses (latency, cost, accuracy, toxicity, hallucination, guardrail hit-rates); wire into CI.
• Add drift detection for conversational systems; implement safe shutdown and auto-rollback.

Platform & Operations

• Package services as containers; deploy to Kubernetes with Helm/Argo CD; configure autoscaling, HPA/VPA, and resource quotas.
• Implement policy chains and guardrails (OPA/Gatekeeper for policy, Presidio for PII, Trivy for image scanning).
• Instrument deep observability: tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics (Prometheus), logs (ELK/OPENSEARCH), cost meters per request/model.

Security & Compliance

• Manage secrets (HashiCorp Vault/KMS), signed images, SBOMs; enforce least-privilege IAM.
• Build tenant isolation and data residency controls; implement red/blue team prompts and jailbreak defenses.

Integration & Enterprise Workflows

• Ship connectors and events for SAP/CRM/ITSM and Kafka topics; design idempotent, retry-safe processors.
• Automate business workflows with pro-code services first; expose low-code surfaces only where appropriate.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Partner with Product, Data, and Platform teams to define SLAs/SLOs and success metrics.
• Mentor engineers on “AI as software” practices; run design reviews and postmortems.

The ideal candidate should possess:

• 6+ years in software engineering (prod services, not just prototypes), including 1+ year leading small projects.
• Strong in one systems language (Python/TypeScript/Go/Java) and comfortable in a second.
• Hands-on with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD (GitHub Actions/GitLab/Jenkins), IaC (Terraform), and cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Practical LLM experience: building RAG/agent apps, prompt design, tool-use, and safety patterns.
• Data skills: designing schemas, batch/stream pipelines, and search indexes; proficiency with SQL and one vector DB.
• Testing mindset: unit/integration tests, load tests, golden datasets for LLM evals.
• Security basics: secrets, policies, scanning, and least-privilege IAM.

We are driven by our AEIOU beliefs - Adventure, Excellence, Integrity, Ownership, and Unity and we seek individuals who embody these values in both their professional and personal lives. We are committed to our Impact: Valuing our clients, Growing our people, and Creating our future.

Together, we make the extraordinary happen.

Learn more about us at ncs.co and visit our LinkedIn career site.