AI Education Assistant Engineer (LLMs & LMS)

Colorado State University; Fort Collins, Northern (CO, KY); Hybrid; USD 21,000 - 25,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible schedule

Conference publications opportunity

Job summary

Colorado State University seeks a motivated Non-Student Hourly Employee to assist in building an AI-powered educational assistant for programming and cybersecurity courses. You will work with AI frameworks, FAISS/ChromaDB, and web interfaces to enable semantic search and robust tools for students.

You will ingest materials, implement embeddings, and ensure privacy and security. The role involves collaboration with faculty and potential conference publications.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, or closely related field.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Experience with APIs, databases, and object-oriented programming.
• Familiarity with ML, NLP, or LLMs.
• Experience with AI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, FAISS, ChromaDB, or similar.
• Experience with web application development (Flask, FastAPI, Gradio, or equivalent).
• Familiarity with Firebase, SQLite, PostgreSQL, or similar databases.
• Knowledge of prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Experience deploying apps with Docker and Google Cloud Platform is desirable.
• Excellent communication, organizational, and documentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance an AI-powered educational assistant using Python and modern AI frameworks.
• Process and ingest course materials for semantic search and retrieval.
• Implement and maintain vector databases and embedding pipelines (e.g., FAISS, ChromaDB).
• Develop and improve user interfaces using Gradio, Flask, or similar tools.
• Build and maintain logging, analytics, and confidence-based evaluation using Firebase.
• Integrate the system with Canvas LMS and CSU authentication services.
• Test, debug, document, and maintain software throughout development.
• Ensure compliance with data privacy, security, and academic integrity requirements.
• Fine-tune open-source LLMs using course-specific datasets.
• Develop hybrid AI architectures with local models and cloud LLMs.
• Apply prompt engineering to improve routing, responses, and costs.
• Deploy and maintain AI services using Google Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Docker, and Firebase.
• Collaborate with faculty on feature development, evaluation, and improvement.

Skills

Python

APIs

Databases

OOP

ML/NLP

LangChain

FAISS

Gradio

Flask

Web development

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Firebase

SQLite

PostgreSQL

Docker

Google Cloud Platform

FAISS/ChromaDB

Job description

Colorado State University seeks a motivated Non-Student Hourly Employee to assist in building an AI-powered educational assistant for programming and cybersecurity courses. You will work with AI frameworks, FAISS/ChromaDB, and web interfaces to enable semantic search and robust tools for students.

You will ingest materials, implement embeddings, and ensure privacy and security. The role involves collaboration with faculty and potential conference publications.