Senior AI/ML Engineer - Production AI & Retrieval Systems

Vizient; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 102,000 - 179,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Vizient in Chicago seeks a seasoned AI-focused software engineer to design, build, deploy, and support production AI capabilities for complex enterprise workflows. You will create AI-enabled applications combining large language models, retrieval, structured data, APIs, and distributed services to deliver reliable, explainable results.

Collaboration with domain experts, data teams, and software engineers is essential to translate expertise into maintainable solutions.

Qualifications

• Relevant degree preferred.
• 5+ years of relevant experience required.
• Strong experience developing production applications using Python.
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, and supporting generative AI or machine learning applications in production environments.
• Experience integrating commercial or open-source large language models through APIs or managed AI platforms.
• Experience with prompt engineering, structured model outputs, tool or function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, or agentic workflows.
• Experience building data-driven APIs and distributed application services using FastAPI or comparable frameworks.
• Experience developing automated tests and evaluation methods for nondeterministic AI behavior.
• Experience with embeddings, semantic search, vector retrieval, reranking, or comparable knowledge-retrieval techniques.
• Experience with cloud-native development, CI/CD pipelines, containerized services, and production deployment.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement production AI-enabled application services and workflow components.
• Build modular large language model and agentic capabilities with clearly defined responsibilities, inputs, outputs, and evaluation criteria.
• Develop retrieval and grounding solutions using structured data, semantic search, vector retrieval, and enterprise knowledge sources.
• Combine deterministic processing, business rules, retrieval, and model-based inference appropriately within application workflows.
• Build APIs, services, orchestration components, and asynchronous processing capabilities for production AI workloads.
• Develop automated evaluation and regression testing for large language model and AI behavior.
• Instrument applications to trace inputs, intermediate results, model interactions, decisions, errors, latency, and operational behavior.
• Investigate AI failure modes and use evaluation evidence to improve prompts, retrieval, workflow design, model selection, and application logic.
• Evaluate models and implementation approaches based on measurable quality, performance, security, maintainability, and cost.
• Implement controls that validate, constrain, and monitor model outputs within enterprise applications.
• Collaborate with domain experts to translate complex decision processes into maintainable software behavior.
• Participate in architecture reviews, technical design sessions, code reviews, and continuous improvement activities.
• Develop reusable AI engineering patterns, components, documentation, and evaluation practices.
• Support deployed AI applications through monitoring, troubleshooting, performance optimization, and production issue resolution.

Skills

Python

Production AI

APIs

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Education

Relevant degree

Tools

FastAPI

Azure

Databricks

Azure AI Foundry

Azure AI Search

Job description

Vizient in Chicago seeks a seasoned AI-focused software engineer to design, build, deploy, and support production AI capabilities for complex enterprise workflows. You will create AI-enabled applications combining large language models, retrieval, structured data, APIs, and distributed services to deliver reliable, explainable results.

Collaboration with domain experts, data teams, and software engineers is essential to translate expertise into maintainable solutions.