AI Software Engineer: LLM-Driven Apps & DevOps

Wayne State University; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Ford Motor Company seeks an AI Software Engineer to design, build, deploy, and operate agentic applications powered by large language models. You will own the AI DevOps lifecycle, including prompts, configurations, model versions, and automated evaluation, within enterprise AI services like Vertex AI.

You will collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Designers, and other Engineers to release early and often, ensuring scalable, secure, and cost-efficient solutions for business

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 2+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production services with Python (or Java).
• 1+ year developing for and deploying to public cloud platforms — GCP preferred (Vertex AI / GenAI services, BigQuery, Cloud Run/Functions).
• Hands-on experience applying GenAI frameworks and services (e.g., Vertex AI Agent Builder, ADK, LangChain/LangGraph, LlamaIndex, function calling, RAG patterns) to build LLM-powered applications.
• 1+ year of DevOps experience with CI/CD tools and pipelines (e.g., Tekton, Cloud Build, Jenkins) and version control (Git).
• Working knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, GKE), including IaC concepts (e.g., Terraform).
• Understanding of LLMOps practices: prompt/model versioning, automated evaluation suites, and monitoring of LLM applications in production.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy agentic applications that orchestrate foundation models to reason, plan, call tools/APIs, and execute multi-step business workflows
• Industrialize the AI delivery lifecycle (AI DevOps / LLMOps): standardize pipelines and CI/CD/CT for prompts, agent configurations, and model versions, with automated regression and evaluation gates before every release
• Build and integrate retrieval-grounded generation (embeddings, vector search, grounding against governed enterprise data sources such as BigQuery)
• Build robust REST APIs and containerized services that serve agent workloads with production-grade latency, cost, and throughput
• Implement observability: trace agent steps and tool calls, monitor quality and safety metrics, detect drift, and drive incident response with root cause analysis
• Apply guardrails, access controls, and responsible-AI practices in line with Ford data governance
• Practice software craftsmanship daily: paired programming, test-first development, code review, and living documentation
• Partner with PMs, Product Owners, Data Scientists, and Security to translate business problems into shippable agentic solutions, and share platform best practices, templates, and standards across teams

Skills

Python

GCP Vertex AI

LangChain

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

DevOps

RAG patterns

Vector databases

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering

Tools

Terraform

Git

BigQuery

Cloud Run

GKE

Job description

Ford Motor Company seeks an AI Software Engineer to design, build, deploy, and operate agentic applications powered by large language models. You will own the AI DevOps lifecycle, including prompts, configurations, model versions, and automated evaluation, within enterprise AI services like Vertex AI.

You will collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Designers, and other Engineers to release early and often, ensuring scalable, secure, and cost-efficient solutions for business