Senior AI Engineer / Backend Developer

HCLSoftware; Roma; Híbrido; EUR 70.000 - 110.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

HCLSoftware in Rome, Italy, seeks a Senior AI Engineer / Backend Developer to own the backend architecture of our agent execution platform. You will design runtime services, APIs, and a secure sandboxed environment to run autonomous agents with policy enforcement and observability.

The role requires 5+ years in backend development, expert Python, and hands‑on experience with GenAI integration, Kubernetes, and secure API design. Hybrid work in Rome is offered.

Formación

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• Backend development: 5+ years building and operating production backend services — REST/gRPC APIs, asynchronous processing, message queues, relational and NoSQL data stores
• Programming: Python (expert level); solid grounding in software design patterns, concurrency, and performance
• Agentic AI / GenAI integration: hands‑on experience building LLM‑powered services and agents — tool/function calling, orchestration (LangChain, LangGraph), RAG — and integrating commercial and open‑weight LLM APIs
• Security engineering: authentication/authorization, secrets management, sandboxing/isolation, audit logging, secure API design
• Scripting & OS: Bash shell scripting on Linux/Unix

Responsabilidades

• Design and build the backend of the agent execution platform: agent runtime and lifecycle services, tool/function‑calling gateway, sandboxed execution orchestration, policy and guardrail enforcement, and audit/observability pipelines.
• Develop robust, well‑documented APIs (REST/gRPC) and event‑driven components that let agents interact safely with enterprise systems, data sources, and MCP‑style tool servers.
• Engineer for production from day one: concurrency, queuing, retries with backoff, idempotency, rate limiting, multi‑tenancy, and LLM cost/usage controls.
• Integrate and operate LLMs and agent frameworks within the platform; build the abstractions that let the team swap models and providers without rework.
• Implement security controls across the stack — least privilege, isolation boundaries, input/output validation, secrets handling, prompt‑injection and data‑exfiltration defences — and wire safety/regression test harnesses into CI/CD.
• Own deployment and operations on Kubernetes: containerization, Helm/IaC, monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and incident response.
• Provide technical leadership: lead architecture and code reviews, define backend and security standards, mentor engineers, and raise the engineering bar across the team.
• Partner with the AI Engineer / Data Scientist to productionize prototypes, expose evaluation infrastructure, and turn research results into shipped components.
• Collaborate with product, security, and platform teams; document designs through ADRs and communicate trade‑offs clearly.

Conocimientos

Python

REST APIs

gRPC

Asynchronous processing

Security engineering

Bash scripting

Kubernetes

Leadership

Code reviews

CI/CD

Educación

Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering

Herramientas

LangChain

LangGraph

LlamaIndex

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Docker

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

Helm

Descripción del empleo

The Incubate Team explores and implements cutting‑edge applications in Agentic AI and Machine Learning. The team is currently building a platform for the safe execution of AI agents: an environment where autonomous agents can run, call tools, and act on data with isolation, policy enforcement, observability, and human oversight built in.

As a Senior AI Engineer / Backend Developer you will own the backend architecture of this platform — the services, APIs, and runtime that make agent execution reliable, secure, and scalable.

Experience: 5+ years in backend software development

Location / Work model: Rome (Italy) / Hybrid

Mandate Skills

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• Backend development: 5+ years building and operating production backend services — REST/gRPC APIs, asynchronous processing, message queues, relational and NoSQL data stores
• Programming: Python (expert level); solid grounding in software design patterns, concurrency, and performance
• Agentic AI / GenAI integration: hands‑on experience building LLM‑powered services and agents — tool/function calling, orchestration (LangChain, LangGraph), RAG — and integrating commercial and open‑weight LLM APIs
• Security engineering: authentication/authorization, secrets management, sandboxing/isolation, audit logging, secure API design
• Scripting &; OS: Bash shell scripting on Linux/Unix

What you will do

• Design and build the backend of the agent execution platform: agent runtime and lifecycle services, tool/function‑calling gateway, sandboxed execution orchestration, policy and guardrail enforcement, and audit/observability pipelines.
• Develop robust, well‑documented APIs (REST/gRPC) and event‑driven components that let agents interact safely with enterprise systems, data sources, and MCP‑style tool servers.
• Engineer for production from day one: concurrency, queuing, retries with backoff, idempotency, rate limiting, multi‑tenancy, and LLM cost/usage controls.
• Integrate and operate LLMs and agent frameworks within the platform; build the abstractions that let the team swap models and providers without rework.
• Implement security controls across the stack — least privilege, isolation boundaries, input/output validation, secrets handling, prompt‑injection and data‑exfiltration defences — and wire safety/regression test harnesses into CI/CD.
• Own deployment and operations on Kubernetes: containerization, Helm/IaC, monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and incident response.
• Provide technical leadership: lead architecture and code reviews, define backend and security standards, mentor engineers, and raise the engineering bar across the team.
• Partner with the AI Engineer / Data Scientist to productionize prototypes, expose evaluation infrastructure, and turn research results into shipped components.
• Collaborate with product, security, and platform teams; document designs through ADRs and communicate trade‑offs clearly.

What we are looking for:

• BE/BTech or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related stream; 5+ years of backend product development, including 1–2+ years building LLM/GenAI‑powered services
• Expert‑level Python and strong software engineering fundamentals: clean architecture, automated testing, code review, version control, CI/CD
• Proven experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed backend systems at scale (APIs, async workers, message brokers such as Kafka/RabbitMQ, SQL/NoSQL databases, caching)
• Hands‑on experience integrating LLM APIs and agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex) and vector/retrieval stacks into production services
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes and container‑based deployment; Docker proficiency
• Strong security mindset: sandboxing, isolation, AuthN/AuthZ (OAuth2/OIDC), secrets management, auditability, and awareness of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications
• Bash shell scripting in Linux/Unix environments
• Ability to lead ambiguous, greenfield technical work from concept to production with limited supervision
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to explain complex technical trade‑offs to mixed audiences

Nice to have

• Java, Go, or Rust for high‑performance or integration components
• Experience with container sandboxing and isolation technologies (gVisor, Firecracker, Kata Containers, WebAssembly runtimes)
• Familiarity with agent interoperability protocols (MCP, A2A) and tool/plugin ecosystems
• LLMOps tooling: model serving (vLLM, TGI), tracing/observability (OpenTelemetry, LangSmith), evaluation frameworks
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Helm)
• Knowledge of AI governance and responsible‑AI frameworks (e.g., NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act requirements)
• Working knowledge of ML fundamentals (PyTorch/TensorFlow) to collaborate effectively with data scientists
• Contributions to open‑source projects

Candidate Data Privacy Notice

https://www.hcltech.com/candidate-privacy-notice