Senior AI Engineer

AllianceBernstein L.P.; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

AllianceBernstein L.P. in Nashville is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to help design, build, and scale an enterprise AI and data platform across investment research, portfolio management, risk, and operations.

You will develop production-grade AI apps, orchestrate agents, and integrate AI into core business systems. You will work with data engineering and platform teams to deliver reliable data products, robust pipelines, and observable, secure services.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software, data, AI, or platform engineering.
• Strong production development experience with Python and SQL.
• Proven ability to build and operate AI applications, data pipelines, APIs, data products, and distributed systems.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into enterprise applications and business workflows.
• Knowledge of cloud data and AI platforms (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) and containerization technologies.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, and RAG architectures.

Responsibilities

• Build reliable, reusable data products for investment and enterprise use cases.
• Design and develop production-grade AI applications, agents, and workflows using Python.
• Implement agent orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, memory, and multi-step workflows.
• Integrate AI capabilities into enterprise apps, data platforms, and business systems.
• Contribute to the shared AI and data platform powering capabilities at scale.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data pipelines

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Cloud platforms

Model evaluation

Agentic AI

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

MS/PhD preferred

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure/AWS/GCP

Job description

Who You'll Work With:

The Senior AI Engineer works with the Data Engineering team under the Center of Excellence (Data Science). This role operates at the intersection of AI engineering, data engineering, agentic AI, platform engineering, and investment technology. It emphasizes Python, enterprise integration, reliable data products, security, CI/CD, observability, model and agent evaluation, and rigorous validation of production AI systems.

What You'll Do:

We are building a next-generation enterprise AI and data platform that enables teams to design, deploy, integrate, and scale intelligent applications and agents across investment research, portfolio management, risk, client, and operational workflows. The platform provides standardized infrastructure, reliable data products, commercial and self-hosted model access, retrieval, agent orchestration, evaluation, observability, security, and governance. It enables teams to rapidly deliver AI-powered capabilities in a scalable, secure, and production-ready manner.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Build reliable, reusable, and AI-ready data products for investment and enterprise use cases.
• Design and develop production-grade AI applications, agents, and intelligent workflows using Python.
• Implement agent orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, memory, and multi-step workflows.
• Integrate AI capabilities into enterprise applications, data platforms, and business systems.
• Contribute to the shared AI and data platform that powers these capabilities at scale.

What We're Looking For:

Core AI and Data Engineering

• 5+ years of experience in software, data, AI, or platform engineering.
• Strong production development experience with Python and SQL.
• Proven ability to build and operate AI applications, data pipelines, APIs, data products, and distributed systems.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into enterprise applications and business workflows.
• Strong understanding of: Object-oriented and asynchronous Python APIs, microservices, and application integration Data modeling, contracts, quality, reconciliation, metadata, and lineage Batch, streaming, event-driven, and API-based architectures Workflow orchestration, distributed processing, and production operations Experience with cloud data and AI platforms such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake. Ability to design scalable, reusable, resilient, and operationally supportable services.
• Generative AI and Agentic Systems Hands-on experience with: Large language models, embeddings, prompt engineering, context engineering, and RAG architecture. Commercial and open-source model APIs and ecosystems. AI agents, agentic workflows, reusable skills, tool calling, structured outputs, and multi-step orchestration. Vector, keyword, metadata-filtered, graph-based, and hybrid retrieval. Agent frameworks such as LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, Pydantic AI, or equivalent platforms.
• Preferred experience includes: MCP servers and clients, agent-to-agent communication, and enterprise search. Semantic layers, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. Agent memory, state management, and human-in-the-loop controls. Document intelligence and multimodal processing. Reusable agent tools, skills, manifests, and registration standards.

Model Hosting and Inference

• Experience with one or more of the following: Azure OpenAI, OpenAI APIs, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or Vertex AI. Hugging Face, vLLM, Ollama, Qwen, or other approved open-source model technologies.
• Containerized model deployment and GPU-based inference. Model serving, API gateways, quantization, memory optimization, and model configuration. Context-window, token, concurrency, batching, throughput, and caching optimization.
• Benchmarking and monitoring model quality, latency, availability, resource utilization, and cost.

Platform Engineering, Security, and DevOps

• Strong experience with: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automated provisioning, and governed deployment. API-first and microservices architectures. Docker, Kubernetes, AKS, GKE, or equivalent container platforms. Authentication, authorization, secrets management, OAuth, managed identities, RBAC, and Microsoft Entra ID or equivalent technologies.
• Repository governance, branch protection, pull-request validation, dependency controls, and software supply-chain security. Metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, monitoring, and alerting. Designing observable, resilient, secure, and production-ready AI systems.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, or comparable tools for: Code generation, refactoring, debugging, testing, and documentation. Data-pipeline, infrastructure, and CI/CD development. Codebase understanding, modernization, architecture extraction, and pull-request review. Governed development supported by automated testing, peer review, security scanning, and controlled deployment. Candidates must be able to independently validate AI-generated code for: Functional correctness and test coverage Security and data-access risks Performance and scalability Maintainability and architectural alignment Dependency, licensing, and software supply-chain concerns Compliance with enterprise engineering standards Evaluation, Observability, and Testing.

Evaluation, Observability, and Testing: Required Hands-on experience with data-quality, model-evaluation, LLM-evaluation, or AI-observability frameworks.

• Experience building: Model benchmarking and evaluation pipelines Data-quality and reconciliation tests Retrieval and RAG evaluations Agent test harnesses and scenario-based simulations Continuous validation and regression testing Production monitoring for data, retrieval, model, and agent quality.
• Ability to measure: Data accuracy, completeness, freshness, and consistency Retrieval relevance and coverage Groundedness, factual consistency, citations, and provenance Tool selection, execution, and structured-output compliance Agent workflow success, failure, and escalation behavior Latency, throughput, reliability, resource utilization, and cost Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, OpenInference, Datadog, Arize, LangSmith, MLflow, Microsoft Foundry evaluation capabilities, or equivalent tools. Ability to use evaluation results to inform model selection, routing, release, rollback, and production-readiness decisions.

About AB

We are a leading global investment management firm offering high-quality research and diversified investment services to institutional clients, retail investors, and private-wealth clients in major markets around the globe. With over 4,000 employees across 57 locations operating in 26 countries and jurisdictions, our ambition is simple: to be the most trusted investment firm in the world. We realize that it's our people who give us a competitive advantage and drive success in the market, and our goal is to create an inclusive culture that rewards hard work. Our culture of intellectual curiosity and collaboration creates an environment where you can thrive and do your best work. Whether you're producing thought-provoking research, identifying compelling investment opportunities, infusing new technologies into our business or providing thoughtful advice to our clients, we are fully invested in you. If you're ready to challenge your limits and empower your career, join us! All are encouraged to apply. AB does not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, disability, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status or any other basis that is prohibited by applicable law. AB’s policies and practices seek to ensure that employment opportunities are available to all employees and applicants and based solely on job-related criteria.

Nashville, Tennessee

We are a leading global investment management firm offering high-quality research and diversified investment services to institutional clients, retail investors, and private-wealth clients in major markets around the globe. With over 4,000 employees across 51 locations operating in 25 countries and jurisdictions, our ambition is simple: to be the most trusted investment firm in the world. We realize that it's our people who give us a competitive advantage and drive success in the market, and our goal is to create an inclusive culture that rewards hard work. Our culture of intellectual curiosity and collaboration creates an environment where you can thrive and do your best work. Whether you're producing thought-provoking research, identifying compelling investment opportunities, infusing new technologies into our business or providing thoughtful advice to our clients, we are fully invested in you. If you're ready to challenge your limits and empower your career, join us! AB does not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, disability, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, military or veteran status or any other basis that is prohibited by applicable law. AB’s policies, as well as practices, seek to ensure that employment opportunities are available to all employees and applicants, based solely on job-related criteria.

Please be advised that AB does not solicit confidential information from job applicants during the screening process, nor extend job offers without the candidate participating in a series of interviews to be properly considered for an open role. If you receive requests for confidential information, outside of the formal interviewing process even if the person asserts that they represent AB, we encourage you not to reply.