Full Stack Developer

MiddleGround Capital; Lexington (KY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

MiddleGround Capital in Lexington, KY is seeking an experienced AI Platform Engineer to build the technical foundation of our internal AI platform and to drive its rollout across the firm.

You will design and develop full-stack applications, integrate large language models into production services, and shape repeatable deployment patterns for portfolio companies, with a focus on reliability, security, and observability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 4–7 years of full-stack development delivering production-grade apps.
• Strong backend with Java/Spring Boot and REST microservices.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs with RAG and cost/latency considerations.
• Cloud experience (AWS or Azure), Docker, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Relational databases and secure authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT, RBAC).
• Proven ability to work independently and communicate well.

Responsibilities

• Review architecture and infrastructure for AI platform with focus on scalability and reliability.
• Design and develop full-stack applications powering internal intelligent systems.
• Integrate LLMs into production services with RAG and prompt engineering.
• Build model orchestration, context/memory strategies, and service layers.
• Develop UI/admin tooling, RBAC, and secure access controls.
• Set up environments (Dev/Stage/Prod); containerize and deploy on AWS/Azure with CI/CD.
• Implement observability, logging, cost optimization, and security hardening.
• Lead portfolio-company AI rollouts, onboarding, and adoption refinements.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

RESTful microservices

LLM integration

RAG

AWS

Azure

Docker

CI/CD

PostgreSQL

OAuth 2.0

JWT

RBAC

Communication

Independent work

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree (preferred)

Tools

Docker

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Azure DevOps

Terraform

LangChain

Snowflake

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Located in Lexington, KY, this role builds the technical foundation of our internal AI platform, supports its rollout across the firm, and helps establish a repeatable deployment model for our portfolio companies.

• Conduct architecture and infrastructure reviews of the AI platform, recommending improvements to design, scalability, and reliability; review proposed local-server specifications and other infrastructure investments.
• Design and develop full-stack applications end-to-end — backend services and APIs, data models, and responsive front-end interfaces — that power internal intelligent systems.
• Integrate large language models (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and comparable) into production services, applying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, and structured outputs to deliver context-aware, reliable AI features.
• Build and refine model orchestration and routing, context and memory strategies, and the supporting service layers for AI-driven workflows.
• Develop user-interface and administrative tooling, reporting interfaces, and role-based access controls for internal users.
• Set up and maintain development, staging, and production environments; containerize and deploy services (Docker) to cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) and establish CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement observability, logging, performance tuning, cost optimization, and security hardening across the platform.
• Develop connectors and integrations to approved internal systems and data sources for the platform and internal workflows.
• Support firm-wide rollout to approximately 100 internal users — onboarding, departmental workflow design, knowledge-capture patterns, training support, and adoption-focused refinements.
• Lead and execute AI-platform rollouts across MiddleGround’s portfolio companies on an ongoing basis — planning each deployment, adapting the standard template to the company’s environment, and driving the engagement from kickoff through go-live.
• Perform hands-on integration work at portfolio companies, connecting their systems of record (ERP, CRM, Snowflake, and other approved sources) through ingestion, normalization, and reporting pipelines.
• Partner with and enable portfolio-company technical and executive teams — providing guidance, technical direction, and training so their staff can own and sustain the platform after deployment.
• Design executive and C-suite workflows for portfolio-company leadership, and continuously refine the repeatable deployment playbook and template to make each successive rollout faster and more consistent.
• Write clear technical documentation and maintain work in Azure DevOps; handle all firm and portfolio-company data in accordance with confidentiality and data-security requirements.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4–7 years of professional full-stack development experience delivering production-grade applications.
• Strong backend development with Java and Spring Boot (or a comparable mainstream stack such as Python or Node.js), building RESTful microservices.
• Demonstrated experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Claude, or comparable) into real applications — including RAG, prompt engineering, and sound reasoning about cost, latency, and output reliability.
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS or Azure), including Docker containerization and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps Pipelines).
• Solid relational database skills (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle), including schema design and query optimization.
• Experience implementing secure authentication and authorization (OAuth 2.0, JWT, role-based access control).
• Proven ability to work independently and own delivery with minimal supervision.
• Strong written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience with data engineering and pipelines, particularly Snowflake, and with ERP and CRM system integration.
• Familiarity with model orchestration frameworks and AI tooling (e.g., LangChain) and AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., GitHub Copilot).
• Experience with event-driven and messaging systems (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Exposure to private equity, financial services, or another data-sensitive, regulated environment.
• Experience leading multi-organization technology rollouts or client-facing deployment programs, including guiding and enabling external teams.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack).

Technical Skills:

Frontend: React.js, Redux, Hooks, Material UI / component libraries

AI / Intelligent Systems: OpenAI API, Anthropic Claude API, RAG, prompt engineering, LLM integration, model orchestration & routing, LangChain

Security: OAuth 2.0, JWT, RBAC, TLS/SSL, secrets management

Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, CloudWatch