Principal AI Engineer: Agentic AI & LLM Systems

ApTask; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

ApTask in New York City is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to design, build, and productionize enterprise-scale Agentic AI, Generative AI, and LLM-powered systems. This is a hands-on leadership role spanning architecture, data pipelines, deployment, and observability.

You will own AI systems end-to-end—from experimentation to production—ensuring secure tool interactions, retrieval, and reasoning over enterprise context.

Qualifications

• 8–14 years of professional software engineering experience; 10+ years preferred.
• Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms.
• Experience with APIs, microservices, system design, and distributed systems.
• Experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines.
• Strong understanding of scalable software architecture.
• Experience with at least one backend language such as Go, Rust, Java, C, or C++ is highly desirable.
• 2+ years of hands‑on LLM/Generative AI engineering experience.
• Experience building and deploying production LLM applications.
• Demonstrated experience designing multiple Agentic AI systems in production.
• Strong understanding of LLM architecture, prompting, context management.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build production-grade Agentic AI systems using LLMs, RAG, tool calling, and agent orchestration.
• Design autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, retrieval, planning, and secure execution of enterprise actions.
• Backend services
• Agent orchestration
• Evaluation frameworks
• Observability
• Cloud infrastructure
• Design and implement production RAG pipelines (chunking, embeddings, retrieval, hybrid search, reranking, context construction).
• Build and integrate MCP servers and secure tool-calling interfaces.
• Develop agent workflows using LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK, CrewAI, or equivalents.
• Implement AI reliability mechanisms including guardrails, validators, deterministic fallbacks, and rollback strategies.
• Build evaluation frameworks for LLM and agentic systems, including offline and continuous evaluation.
• Implement AI observability and tracing with LangSmith, Langfuse, monitoring cost/throughput/scalability.
• Design and operate scalable backend services, APIs, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Develop high-quality Python and SQL code.
• Deploy AI apps across AWS, Azure, or GCP; work with Kubernetes/Lambda.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM / Generative AI

Agentic AI

RAG & Vector Search

Cloud computing

Python

Distributed systems

LangSmith / Langfuse

Kubernetes

Tool integration

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

LangGraph

Claude Agent SDK

CrewAI

Google ADK

Terraform

Kubernetes

Bedrock/Vertex AI

Job description

ApTask in New York City is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to design, build, and productionize enterprise-scale Agentic AI, Generative AI, and LLM-powered systems. This is a hands-on leadership role spanning architecture, data pipelines, deployment, and observability.

You will own AI systems end-to-end—from experimentation to production—ensuring secure tool interactions, retrieval, and reasoning over enterprise context.