AI Development Engineer - Contractual role

Proximity Works; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Best-in-class salary

Proximity Talks

Continuous learning

High-impact work

Job summary

Proximity is seeking an AI Development Engineer to solve complex engineering problems by using AI to improve speed, quality, and cost efficiency. This role reimagines traditional software engineering for an AI-augmented world, moving from coding-heavy execution to system orchestration, validation, and AI-first application development.

The ideal candidate is a strong hands-on engineer who can work with AI tools, foundation models, multimodal systems, and research-driven implementation to build

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience building production-grade systems.
• Experience with one or more modalities such as vision, text, audio, or speech.
• Familiarity with LLMs, VLMs, and multimodal AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Translate ambiguous requirements into clear system designs and validation plans.
• Build, scale, and maintain AI-powered production systems.
• Design workflows where LLMs, VLMs, tools, APIs, retrieval systems, and microservices collaborate.
• Use AI-assisted development tools while ensuring quality, security, and maintainability.
• Prevent AI-generated code bloat and unnecessary complexity.
• Build observability, evaluation, testing, and monitoring for AI outputs.
• Optimize prompts, model selection, workflows, and inference cost.
• Apply Responsible AI principles including safety, privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability.
• Work with cross-functional teams across product, engineering, security, data, and design.
• Mentor engineers to move to AI-first engineering practices.

Skills

Strong software engineering

Job description

An?AI Development Engineer?is responsible for solving complex engineering problems by using AI to improve speed, quality, and cost efficiency. This role reimagines traditional software engineering for an AI-augmented world ? moving from coding-heavy execution to system orchestration, structured thinking, validation, and agentic application development. The ideal candidate is a strong hands-on engineer who can work with AI tools, foundation models, multimodal systems, and research-driven implementation to build reliable, scalable, production-ready AI applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Translate ambiguous product or business requirements into clear technical specifications, system designs, and validation plans.
• Build, maintain, and scale AI-powered production systems and agentic applications.
• Design workflows where LLMs, VLMs, tools, APIs, retrieval systems, and traditional microservices work together reliably.
• Use AI-assisted development tools while maintaining code quality, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Prevent AI-generated code bloat, dead code, and unnecessary complexity.
• Build observability, evaluation, testing, and monitoring systems for AI-generated outputs.
• Optimize prompts, model selection, workflows, and inference cost.
• Apply Responsible AI principles including safety, privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability.
• Work with cross-functional teams across product, engineering, security, data, and design.
• Mentor engineers to move from implementation-heavy development to system orchestration and AI-first engineering practices.

Requirements

Candidates who demonstrate:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience building production-grade systems.

Experience in one or more modalities such as:

Vision/images, video, text, audio, speech.

• Deeper knowledge and hands-on experience with LLMs, VLMs, multimodal AI systems, and foundation model architectures.
• Ability to actively find, read, understand, and implement ideas from AI research papers.
• Experience building or integrating agentic applications, AI copilots, RAG systems, workflow automation, or multimodal GenAI systems.
• Strong understanding of system design, APIs, data flows, testing, observability, security, and production reliability.
• Practical experience with prompt engineering, context engineering, model evaluation, benchmarking, and AI workflow orchestration.
• Ability to convert ambiguous requirements into structured specs, implementation plans, and validation frameworks.
• Strong debugging, problem-solving, communication, ownership, and learning agility.

NOTE: This is a 6-month contractual role, with the possibility of extension based on performance and business requirements.

Benefits

• Best-in-class salary: We hire strong talent and compensate accordingly.
• Proximity Talks: Meet and learn from designers, engineers, product leaders, and AI practitioners.
• Continuous learning: Work with a world-class team and stay close to the latest in AI, engineering, and product development.
• High-impact work: Build AI-first systems and products used at scale by global clients.

About Us

Proximity is the trusted technology, design, and consulting partner for some of the biggest Sports, Media, and Entertainment companies in the world. We?re headquartered in San Francisco and have offices in Palo Alto, Dubai, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Since 2019, Proximity has built high-impact, scalable products used by millions of users every day. Today, we are a global team of engineers, designers, product managers, and experts solving complex problems and building cutting-edge technology at scale.