Senior Forge AI Engineer

Norstella; Santa Fe (NM); Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Norstella seeks a Senior Forge AI Engineer to design and operate a greenfield agentic platform, Forge, across orchestration, memory, and safety layers. You will work on end-to-end agent pipelines, from memory management to tool use within a safe architecture, shaping production-grade AI systems.

The role emphasizes building scalable, auditable agent platforms, integrating RAG patterns and memory architectures, while ensuring secure, compliant operation in a regulated domain.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building and operating LLM-powered or agentic systems in production.
• Production experience with at least one agentic framework and a clear understanding of the trade-offs each introduces.
• Hands-on experience authoring MCP servers or designing tool-use APIs with explicit capability contracts and versioning.
• Experience with agent memory architectures — context management and long-term memory stores across multi-step workflows.
• Strong fundamentals in Python and/or TypeScript; able to own production agent code from design through operation.
• Proficient in prompt engineering, tool calling, and multi-step orchestration; knowledgeable about failure modes of non-deterministic systems.
• Working knowledge of RAG patterns, vector databases, and LLM evaluation methodologies applied to production agent outputs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agents across the Forge chain — orchestration, tool-use surfaces, MCP server integrations, prompt and RAG pipelines — and set the agentic design patterns the team ships against.
• Own multi-agent coordination architecture: inter-agent trust boundaries, message schema contracts, partial failure handling, and recovery across the agent graph.
• Build and evolve the MCP server layer — tool schema design, capability contracts, versioning — so Forge's tool-use surface is well-defined and safe to extend.
• Design agent memory and state management: context window strategy, long-term memory integration, state persistence across complex multi-step workflows.
• Own agent quality end-to-end: eval harnesses, behavioral benchmarks, continuous evaluation pipelines, and the acceptance criteria that gate every agent release.
• Instrument agent-specific observability — token tracing, tool-call chain logging, cost attribution per run — so the platform is debuggable and defensible.
• Build safe-by-design primitives: least-privilege tool-use, PII/PHI handling, structured output validation, red-team partnership with Security.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

LLM frameworks

Agentic systems

MCP servers

Prompt engineering

Tool use APIs

Tools

LangGraph

CrewAI

Autogen

Semantic Kernel

MCP

Job description

Senior Forge AI Engineer

Company: Norstella

Location: Remote, United States

Date Posted: Oct 2, 2026

Employment Type: Full Time

Job ID: R-2125

Job Description – Senior Forge AI Engineer

About Norstella

Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions platform dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.

Norstella unites five market-leading brands (Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, and The Dedham Group) that all have a shared vision of improving patient access to life-saving therapy. Norstella delivers must-have answers and insights for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision-making. We help our clients:

• Accelerate the drug development cycle
• Make data driven commercial and financial decisions
• Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
• Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
• Identify and address barriers to patient access
• Leverage the latest AI to turn data into insights for faster and better decision making

Norstella serves almost every pharmaceutical and biotech company in the world, along with regulators like the FDA, and payers. By providing critical proprietary data supporting AI-driven workflows, Norstella helps clients make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Norstella’s investments in AI are transforming how data is consumed and decisions are made, disrupting inefficient legacy workflows and helping the industry become more efficient, innovative, and responsive to patient needs.

About The Position:

Most AI engineering roles ask you to bolt an LLM onto an existing product. This one doesn't. We're building Forge — a greenfield agentic platform that replaces the human-driven SDLC with an autonomous agent chain, end-to-end. You'd be working across the full stack: orchestration, multi-agent coordination, MCP server design, RAG pipelines, eval harnesses, and the safety primitives that make non-deterministic systems trustworthy in production. Not one layer. All of it.

The platform is live and shipping. The hard problems are real: agent memory and state across multi-step runs, inter-agent trust and failure recovery, cost attribution at scale, compliance in a regulated industry. If you want to work at the frontier of agentic systems — not on a demo, on something that actually runs — this is that role.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and build agents across the Forge chain — orchestration, tool-use surfaces, MCP server integrations, prompt and RAG pipelines — and set the agentic design patterns the team ships against.
• Own multi-agent coordination architecture: inter-agent trust boundaries, message schema contracts, partial failure handling, and recovery across the agent graph.
• Build and evolve the MCP server layer — tool schema design, capability contracts, versioning — so Forge's tool-use surface is well-defined and safe to extend.
• Design agent memory and state management: context window strategy, long-term memory integration, state persistence across complex multi-step workflows.
• Own agent quality end-to-end: eval harnesses, behavioral benchmarks, continuous evaluation pipelines, and the acceptance criteria that gate every agent release.
• Instrument agent-specific observability — token tracing, tool-call chain logging, cost attribution per run — so the platform is debuggable and defensible.
• Build safe-by-design primitives: least-privilege tool-use, PII/PHI handling, structured output validation, red-team partnership with Security.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years building and operating LLM-powered or agentic systems in production — systems that ran, failed, and got fixed.
• Production experience with at least one agentic framework (LangGraph, CrewAI, Autogen, Semantic Kernel, MCP, or comparable) and a clear understanding of the trade-offs each introduces.
• Hands-on experience authoring MCP servers or designing tool-use APIs with explicit capability contracts and versioning.
• Experience with agent memory architectures — context management, long-term memory stores, state persistence across multi-step workflows.
• Strong fundamentals in Python and/or TypeScript; able to own production agent code from design through operation.
• Proficient in prompt engineering, tool/function calling, and multi-step orchestration — and fluent in the failure modes of non-deterministic systems.
• Working knowledge of RAG patterns, vector databases, and LLM evaluation methodologies applied to production agent outputs.
• Working knowledge of AI/ML safety engineering: OWASP LLM Top 10, prompt injection defenses, RAG hardening, adversarial agent testing.

Preferred Qualifications

• Pharma, life sciences, or healthcare data experience is a plus — not a requirement.

Our guiding principles for success at Norstella:

• Bold, Passionate, Mission-First We have a lofty mission to Smooth Access to Life Saving Therapies, and we will get there by being bold and passionate about the mission and our clients. Our clients and the mission in what we are trying to accomplish must be in the forefront of our minds in everything we do.
• Integrity, Truth, Reality We make promises that we can keep, and goals that push us to new heights. Our integrity offers us the opportunity to learn and improve by being honest about what works and what doesn’t. By being true to the data and producing realistic metrics, we are able to create plans and resources to achieve our goals.
• Kindness, Empathy, Grace We will empathize with everyone’s situation, provide positive and constructive feedback with kindness, and accept opportunities for improvement with grace and gratitude. We use this principle across the organization to collaborate and build lines of open communication.
• Resilience, Mettle, Perseverance We will persevere – even in difficult and challenging situations. Our ability to recover from missteps and failures in a positive way will help us to be successful in our mission.
• Humility, Gratitude, Learning We will be true learners by showing humility and gratitude in our work. We recognize that the smartest person in the room is the one who is always listening, learning, and willing to shift their thinking.

Norstella is an equal opportunities employer and does not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, color, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. Our ethos is to respect and value people’s differences, to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives so that they feel proud of the part they play in our success. We believe that all decisions about people at work should be based on the individual’s abilities, skills, performance and behavior and our business requirements. Norstella operates a zero-tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, abuse or harassment.

Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.