Senior AI Platform Engineer - Full-Stack Expert

Protagonist; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 95,000 - 141,000; Full time

Job summary

Protagonist is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer (AI Platform) to own production systems end-to-end—from backend services and data infrastructure to analyst-facing applications—and to apply modern AI capabilities within a robust software platform.

The ideal candidate excels as a full-stack engineer with experience building AI- and LLM-powered production systems. You will design, implement, and deploy across the stack, collaborating with leadership to steer product and architecture.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production software with ownership of full-stack systems.
• U.S. person eligible to work on government contracts; SECRET clearance preferred.
• Expert-level Python with Django and PostgreSQL experience.
• Strong TypeScript/React skills for data-heavy interfaces.
• Experience building LLM applications: agents, tool calling, RAG, prompt engineering.
• Experience with search infra (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) and event-driven architectures (Kafka, Celery/Redis).
• Hands-on with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD; Terraform familiarity.

Responsibilities

• Own features end-to-end across the platform: Django REST APIs, React/TypeScript UI, workflows, and LLM services.
• Partner with leadership on architecture and roadmap; translate product visions into designs.
• Build LLM-powered systems on AWS Bedrock with tool-using agents and OpenSearch-based retrieval.
• Develop data/ML workflows using Metaflow with Argo/Kubernetes orchestration.
• Design robust schema, indexing, and event-driven processing; ensure clean API contracts.
• Collaborate with customer-facing teams to deliver scalable solutions.
• Work in sprints with the team, balancing trade-offs and shipping value.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

React

LLM applications

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

AWS Bedrock

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Django

PostgreSQL

OpenSearch

Kafka

Redis/Celery

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Git

Job description

Protagonist is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer (AI Platform) to own production systems end-to-end—from backend services and data infrastructure to analyst-facing applications—and to apply modern AI capabilities within a robust software platform.

The ideal candidate excels as a full-stack engineer with experience building AI- and LLM-powered production systems. You will design, implement, and deploy across the stack, collaborating with leadership to steer product and architecture.