Senior Applied AI Engineer — Production-Grade AI at Scale

Toptal; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Toptal is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions. You’ll collaborate with a platform engineering team and translate AI concepts into reliable software, focusing on measurable improvements in production quality, reliability, and performance.

You will design evaluations, tune prompts and model behavior, define metrics, and work with product and business stakeholders to shape AI-driven features and capabilities across systems and

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in machine learning and applied AI.
• Track record deploying production AI/ML services.
• Strong software engineering and coding skills.
• Hands-on experience with LLM- and agent-based applications.
• Prompt engineering and optimization experience.
• Ability to measure AI quality, reliability, and performance.
• Experience with APIs, data pipelines, and backend systems.
• Excellent communication with engineers, product, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions.
• Design and run rigorous evaluations to improve prompts, model behavior, agent orchestration, reliability, and performance.
• Interpret evaluation results and translate into concrete engineering improvements.
• Define and track metrics for AI quality, reliability, and production performance.
• Build and integrate AI capabilities across APIs, data pipelines, backends, and AI platforms.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to ship maintainable, production-quality solutions.
• Partner with product teams and business stakeholders to translate requirements into reliable AI behavior.

Skills

Machine learning

Applied AI

Production AI

Software engineering

Prompt engineering

Model evaluation

Agent orchestration

APIs

Cloud environments

Communication

Job description

Toptal is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and optimize production-grade agentic AI solutions. You’ll collaborate with a platform engineering team and translate AI concepts into reliable software, focusing on measurable improvements in production quality, reliability, and performance.

You will design evaluations, tune prompts and model behavior, define metrics, and work with product and business stakeholders to shape AI-driven features and capabilities across systems and