Backend AI Engineer

Advanced Tech Placement; Alpharetta (GA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Advanced Tech Placement is seeking a Java AI / Agent Engineer to build AI-powered solutions for enterprise clients. This hands-on role sits at the intersection of robust backend Java engineering and applied AI, focusing on production-ready AI agents and LLM-powered applications.

The ideal candidate will have strong Java/Spring experience and have deployed AI agents or LLM applications to production, working directly in Java to develop agents that can use tools, manage context, handle failures,

Qualifications

• Strong professional experience with Java (Java 21+).
• Experience with Spring Boot 3.x and production APIs/backend services.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, testing, debugging, and API design.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy AI agents and agentic workflows using Java 21+, Spring Boot 3.x, Spring AI, or LangChain4j.
• Build production APIs and backend services using Spring Web, Spring Data, and Spring Security.
• Implement agent capabilities including tool calling, orchestration, memory/context, multi-step workflows, retries, and guardrails.
• Design prompts and structured outputs and apply RAG, including embeddings, chunking, vector databases, and retrieval optimization.
• Design and maintain LLM evaluations (evals) to measure quality, reliability, and performance.
• Evaluate and select AI models based on quality, latency, cost, and risk.
• Optimize LLM applications for performance and cost, including caching, batching, model routing, and prompt/token optimization.
• Implement LLM observability and monitoring using tools such as Langfuse, Arize, Weights & Biases, Datadog, or similar.
• Use AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, or Claude Code throughout development, testing, debugging, and refactoring.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to prototype, test, and continuously improve AI capabilities while maintaining clean, well-tested Java code.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

API design

Testing

Debugging

Backend development

Tools

LangChain4j

Spring AI

GitHub Copilot

Copilot CLI

Job description

The strongest candidates are software engineers first and AI practitioners second, strong Java developers who have also gained meaningful, hands-on experience building AI agents and LLM applications in production.

We are not looking for someone who simply understands AI concepts or has integrated an LLM API. We want someone who can build, evaluate, optimize, observe, and continuously improve reliable AI solutions in a Java/Spring production environment.

Key Priorities

• Strong Java/Spring engineering
• LLM evals, optimization, model evaluation, and observability
• AI-assisted and ideally spec-driven development

About the Role

We are looking for a Java AI / Agent Engineer to build AI-powered solutions for enterprise clients. This is a hands-on role at the intersection of strong backend Java engineering and applied AI, with a focus on building reliable, production-ready AI agents and LLM-powered applications.

The ideal candidate has strong Java/Spring experience and has personally built and deployed AI agents, LLM applications, or agentic workflows to production. You¬タルll work directly in Java to develop agents that can use tools, retrieve information, manage context, handle failures, and complete complex workflows.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and deploy AI agents and agentic workflows using Java 21+, Spring Boot 3.x, Spring AI, or LangChain4j.
• Build production APIs and backend services using Spring Web, Spring Data, and Spring Security.
• Implement agent capabilities including tool calling, orchestration, memory/context, multi-step workflows, retries, and guardrails.
• Design prompts and structured outputs and apply RAG, including embeddings, chunking, vector databases, and retrieval optimization.
• Design and maintain LLM evaluations (evals) to measure quality, reliability, and performance.
• Evaluate and select AI models based on quality, latency, cost, and risk.
• Optimize LLM applications for performance and cost, including caching, batching, model routing, and prompt/token optimization.
• Implement LLM observability and monitoring using tools such as Langfuse, Arize, Weights & Biases, Datadog, or similar to track traces, latency, token usage, cost, and failures.
• Use AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, or Claude Code throughout development, testing, debugging, and refactoring.
• Collaborate with engineers and stakeholders to prototype, test, and continuously improve AI capabilities while maintaining clean, well-tested Java code.

Required Qualifications

• Strong professional experience with Java, including modern Java versions such as Java 21+.
• Strong experience with Spring Boot 3.x and production APIs/backend services.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, testing, debugging, and API design.

AI / Agent Development

• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI agents or agentic applications to production.
• Experience with Spring AI, LangChain4j, or comparable LLM/agent frameworks.
• Understanding of agent architecture, including tool calling, orchestration, memory, retries, and guardrails.
• Hands-on experience with LLM prompt design and RAG.
• Experience with LLM observability/monitoring in a production environment.

AI-Assisted Development

• Daily hands-on experience with AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, or Claude Code.
• Experience incorporating AI into coding, testing, debugging, and development workflows.
• Experience with spec-driven or spec-to-code development is highly preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience optimizing LLM applications for performance and cost.
• Experience benchmarking and selecting models based on quality, latency, cost, and risk.
• Experience with MCP, OpenAPI-based tool schemas, or enterprise API/tool integrations.
• Experience deploying AI services to AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with CLI-based coding assistants such as Copilot CLI or Claude Code.