Applied AI Engineer

Toptal; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Toptal is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions. You’ll collaborate with a platform engineering team and translate AI concepts into reliable software, focusing on measurable improvements in production quality, reliability, and performance.

You will design evaluations, tune prompts and model behavior, define metrics, and work with product and business stakeholders to shape AI-driven features and capabilities across systems and

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in machine learning and applied AI.
• Track record deploying production AI/ML services.
• Strong software engineering and coding skills.
• Hands-on experience with LLM- and agent-based applications.
• Prompt engineering and optimization experience.
• Ability to measure AI quality, reliability, and performance.
• Experience with APIs, data pipelines, and backend systems.
• Excellent communication with engineers, product, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions.
• Design and run rigorous evaluations to improve prompts, model behavior, agent orchestration, reliability, and performance.
• Interpret evaluation results and translate into concrete engineering improvements.
• Define and track metrics for AI quality, reliability, and production performance.
• Build and integrate AI capabilities across APIs, data pipelines, backends, and AI platforms.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to ship maintainable, production-quality solutions.
• Partner with product teams and business stakeholders to translate requirements into reliable AI behavior.

Skills

Machine learning

Applied AI

Production AI

Software engineering

Prompt engineering

Model evaluation

Agent orchestration

APIs

Cloud environments

Communication

Job description

We’re looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to help design, build, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions. You’ll work alongside an established platform engineering team and focus on turning AI concepts into reliable, scalable software, not pure research. The core of the role is making AI systems measurably better in production. You’ll design meaningful evaluations, tune prompts and model behavior, refine agent orchestration, and work with engineers, product teams, and business stakeholders to raise quality, reliability, and performance.

What You’ll Do

• Design, develop, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions.
• Design and run rigorous evaluations that improve prompts, model behavior, agent orchestration, reliability, and performance.
• Interpret evaluation and benchmarking results and turn them into concrete engineering improvements.
• Define and track metrics for AI quality, reliability, and performance in production.
• Build and integrate AI capabilities across APIs, data pipelines, backend systems, and AI platforms.
• Work closely with platform engineers to ship maintainable, production-quality solutions.
• Partner with product teams and business stakeholders to translate requirements into reliable AI behavior.

What You Bring

• Deep expertise in machine learning and applied AI.
• A track record of building and deploying production AI/ML services.
• Strong software engineering and coding skills.
• Hands-on experience developing or optimizing LLM- and agent-based applications.
• Strong command of prompt engineering and optimization.
• Strong knowledge of model evaluation and benchmarking, including designing evals and interpreting results.
• A solid understanding of how to measure AI quality, reliability, and performance.
• Strong knowledge of agent behavior and orchestration patterns.
• Experience with APIs, data pipelines, backend systems, and AI platforms.
• Familiarity with modern AI tools and frameworks and with major cloud environments.
• Excellent communication skills and experience collaborating with engineers, product, and business stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• A background as an Applied AI Scientist, AI Engineer, or Machine Learning Engineer.