Applied AI Engineer (Agentic Systems)

Careers InitiateFirst; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Careers InitiateFirst is seeking a seasoned software engineer with 5–8 years of hands-on experience to own production services and drive reliability improvements. Strong Python skills and TypeScript familiarity for customer-facing tools are required, with a demonstrated ability to reason about retrieval and context engineering in real-world deployments.

The ideal candidate will document architecture, communicate status, and make informed trade-offs across complex systems, collaborating with

Qualifications

• 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong Python and at least one additional language; TypeScript preferred for customer-facing apps.
• Experience owning production services, incident response and reliability improvements.
• Knowledge of retrieval and context engineering; offline and production evaluations as release gates.

Responsibilities

• Own production services and respond to incidents with a focus on reliability improvements.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Production ownership

Incident response

Reliability

Context engineering

Retrieval engineering

Evaluation discipline

Framework judgment

Technical communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Requirements

• Experience: 5-8 Years
• 5–8 years of professional experience, primarily in hands-on software engineering.Demonstrated ownership of production services, incident response and reliability improvement.
• Strong Python, with proficiency in at least one additional language. TypeScript is preferred for customer-facing applications and integration tooling.
• Demonstrable agentic work.Evidence of building and operating systems with tool use, multi-step orchestration and failure recovery for real users, including the ability to explain production failures and corrective changes.
• Working knowledge of retrieval and context engineering- embeddings, hybrid search, re‑ranking, context‑window economics and the ability to determine when retrieval is not the appropriate design.
• Evaluation discipline.Experience using offline and production evaluations as release gates, with automated scoring calibrated against human review.
• Framework judgement.Ability to choose between lightweight custom orchestration and a framework based on system complexity, maintainability and operational requirements.
• Business and technical communication.Ability to document architecture and decisions, communicate delivery status, and explain non-deterministic behaviour, risk and trade‑offs to accountable business and technology stakeholders

Qualification

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field