Experienced Senior Context Engineer, Digital Transformation & Innovation

BDO USA, LLP; Grand Rapids (MI); On-site; USD 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

BDO USA, LLP in Grand Rapids, MI seeks an Experienced Senior Context Engineer to design and build reusable context assets for BDO Advantage. You will lead agent-instruction standards and grounding corpora, guiding a team of engineers with support from the AI Engineering Manager and product teams.

Responsibilities cover context and knowledge engineering, retrieval-grounding pipelines, evaluation, and risk management in line with firm security and regulatory standards.

Qualifications

• Five (5) or more years of software/AI engineering experience.
• Three (3) or more years building context, RAG, or knowledge-management systems.
• Experience defining reusable engineering assets, patterns, or standards.

Responsibilities

• Designs and builds complex, reusable context assets, agent-instruction files, and patterns.
• Manages retrieval pipelines and grounding quality.
• Mentors junior and mid-level engineers and collaborates with product teams.

Skills

Context engineering

Retrieval design

Grounding for LLM systems

Mentoring & guidance

Communication & problem solving

Education

High School Diploma/GED

Bachelor's degree in CS/IS/Engineering/IT

Tools

CLAUDE.md & equivalents

Claude Code

Azure AI services (Foundry/OpenAI/Search)

Job description

Job Summary:

The Experienced Senior Context Engineer is a senior individual contributor responsible for designing and building the reusable context assets that power BDO Advantage's AI-native product and process development. This role owns complex context and knowledge work-skill libraries, agent-instruction standards (CLAUDE.md and equivalents), prompt and context patterns, and retrieval-grounding corpora-and establishes conventions and quality standards that other engineers follow. The Experienced Senior Context Engineer works with a high degree of autonomy, provides technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, and partners closely with the AI Engineering Manager and product teams to ensure assurance domain knowledge is captured as high-quality, governed, agent-consumable context. The role reports to the Context Engineering Manager and operates within the Advantage SDLC, firm policies, and security standards.

Job Duties:

Context & Knowledge Engineering

• Designs and builds complex, reusable context assets-skill libraries, agent-instruction files (CLAUDE.md and equivalents), and prompt and context patterns-for use across DT&I products
• Serves as a senior technical resource on context-as-code practice, establishing conventions, inheritance, and versioning standards for the team
• Codifies BDO assurance domain knowledge (AKB) into structured, retrievable, governed knowledge with appropriate provenance and citation discipline
• Reviews context and skill contributions from other engineers for quality, security, and reuse
• Evaluates and pilots emerging context-engineering tools and frameworks to improve grounding quality and developer productivity

Retrieval & Grounding Engineering

• Designs and tunes retrieval pipelines (chunking strategy, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, metadata filtering) for accuracy, cost, and latency using Azure AI Search and vector stores
• Owns retrieval-corpus curation and lifecycle management including source selection, freshness, versioning, and retirement of stale knowledge
• Builds grounding evaluation, regression testing, and quality metrics for retrieval-augmented features

Context Quality, Evaluation & Enablement

• Defines and runs evaluation for context quality and grounding fidelity across products
• Contributes context scaffolding and standards for the Advantage Forge citizen-engineer program and product teams
• Mentors junior and mid-level engineers on context-engineering practice and maintains team documentation

Risk Management

• Ensures context assets and grounded knowledge comply with firm security, privacy, and regulatory standards (SOC 2, PCAOB AS 2201, QC 1000, ISO 27001)
• Prevents sensitive or restricted data from entering prompts, corpora, or model context, and maintains traceability of grounded knowledge

Performs other duties as assigned

• Willingly accepts share of less desirable assignments

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to engineering and development team members, as assigned
• Reviews and provides feedback on the work of other engineers, as assigned

Qualifications, Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

Education:

• High School Diploma/GED, required
• Bachelor's degree with a focus in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Information Technology, preferred

Experience:

• Five (5) or more years of experience in software, data, or AI engineering, or related technology fields, required
• Three (3) or more years of experience building LLM context, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or knowledge-management systems, required
• Experience defining reusable engineering assets, patterns, or technical standards, required
• Experience mentoring or providing technical guidance to other engineers, preferred
• Experience delivering AI or knowledge solutions in professional services, assurance, or accounting industries, preferred

License/Certifications:

• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate, or equivalent, preferred

Technology:

• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Azure AI services including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Search, required
• Strong understanding of LLM context windows, prompting, retrieval, and grounding, and how each affects accuracy, cost, and reliability, required
• Experience with retrieval and vector technologies (embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, indexing), required
• Experience with agent-instruction and skill systems (CLAUDE.md and equivalents) and Markdown-based knowledge structures, required
• Experience with agentic development tooling (Claude Code or equivalent), Git-based workflows, and .NET/C# and/or Python, preferred

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities:

• Deep knowledge of context engineering, retrieval design, and grounding for production LLM systems
• Ability to work independently on complex, ambiguous problems and provide technical guidance to others
• Ability to translate subject-matter expertise into machine-consumable knowledge
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a focus on accuracy, reliability, and grounding quality
• Strong communication skills with the ability to convey technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Self-directed with the ability to manage multiple priorities and competing deadlines
• Collaborative mindset with the ability to build relationships across teams
• Ability to travel up to 10%, no relocation required

Individual salaries that are offered to a candidate are determined after consideration of numerous factors including but not limited to the candidate's qualifications, experience, skills, and geography.

National Range: $110,000 - $140,000
Maryland Range: $110,000 - $140,000
NYC/Long Island/Westchester Range: $110,000 - $140,000