Senior Software Development Engineer III

Advanced Resource Technologies, Inc.; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Advanced Resource Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer III to support ARPA-H’s GRACE development team.

This role focuses on building agentic AI systems, LLM orchestration, tool-calling, and AI-powered product development for GRACE, ARPA-H’s production assistant. You will design multi-agent workflows, manage LLM orchestration, and implement tool-calling infrastructure while collaborating with product, UX, and operations to deliver reliable, observable solutions

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Proven experience building and shipping complex products in high-velocity environments.
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend programming language.
• Experience with algorithms, APIs, data structures, and software design patterns.
• Experience building systems on major cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with containerization and CI/CD pipelines.
• Hands-on experience building production systems on top of LLMs including tool-calling, RAG, multi-step reasoning, and context management preferred.
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration frameworks and MCP integrations preferred.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, token economics, and LLM evaluation pipelines preferred.
• Experience building customer-facing AI platforms or developer tools at scale preferred.
• Background in security-conscious engineering and responsible AI guardrails preferred.
• Strong communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.
• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or regulated environments preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design and build GRACE’s core agentic workflows including multi-step reasoning, planning, memory, and tool usage
• Implement and evolve A2A communication patterns enabling collaboration across single and multi-agent systems
• Build and maintain tool-calling infrastructure including tool definitions, schemas, retry logic, and result formatting
• Develop MCP client-side integrations enabling GRACE agents to discover and invoke tools
• Design multi-agent workflows that are observable, reliable, and production-ready
• Own LLM orchestration including prompt construction, context management, model selection, and response parsing
• Build and maintain RAG capabilities including query formulation, citation grounding, ranking, and hallucination mitigation
• Implement prompt engineering patterns and system prompts across OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini
• Manage context window budgets including truncation, summarization, and pagination logic
• Build evaluation pipelines for grounding assessment, regression testing, safety checks, and A/B experimentation
• Develop new AI-powered capabilities end-to-end from backend application logic to frontend API contracts
• Rapidly prototype new agentic AI features and iterate based on user feedback and experimentation
• Collaborate with product, UX, operations, and applied science teams to deliver user-focused solutions
• Instrument workflows with tracing, logging, and metrics to ensure observability and reliability
• Define and monitor application-level SLOs including tool success rates, response quality, and latency
• Implement fallback and guardrail logic for AI services and model outputs
• Write production-quality code that is readable, tested, documented, and maintainable
• Participate in design reviews and mentor engineers across the team
• Ensure privacy, security, and compliance across all application logic and data handling

Skills

Python

Backend development

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

LLMs

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Software Eng

Job description

Senior Software Development Engineer III

Advanced Resource Technologies

Senior Software Development Engineer III

Washington, DC 20001

Advanced Resource Technologies, Inc. (ARTI) is currently recruiting for a Senior Software Development Engineer III to support the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). This position is full-time, exempt. Start date is immediate upon selection and public trust clearance processing as required.

SUMMARY

The Senior Software Development Engineer III role would be supporting the GRACE Development Team within ARPA-H. This role focuses on application-layer agentic AI systems, LLM orchestration, tool-calling systems, and AI-powered product development supporting GRACE, ARPA-H’s production AI assistant.

• Design and build GRACE’s core agentic workflows including multi-step reasoning, planning, memory, and tool usage
• Implement and evolve A2A communication patterns enabling collaboration across single and multi-agent systems
• Build and maintain tool-calling infrastructure including tool definitions, schemas, retry logic, and result formatting
• Develop MCP client-side integrations enabling GRACE agents to discover and invoke tools
• Design multi-agent workflows that are observable, reliable, and production-ready
• Own LLM orchestration including prompt construction, context management, model selection, and response parsing
• Build and maintain RAG capabilities including query formulation, citation grounding, ranking, and hallucination mitigation
• Implement prompt engineering patterns and system prompts across OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini
• Manage context window budgets including truncation, summarization, and pagination logic
• Build evaluation pipelines for grounding assessment, regression testing, safety checks, and A/B experimentation
• Develop new AI-powered capabilities end-to-end from backend application logic to frontend API contracts
• Rapidly prototype new agentic AI features and iterate based on user feedback and experimentation
• Collaborate with product, UX, operations, and applied science teams to deliver user-focused solutions
• Instrument workflows with tracing, logging, and metrics to ensure observability and reliability
• Define and monitor application-level SLOs including tool success rates, response quality, and latency
• Implement fallback and guardrail logic for AI services and model outputs
• Write production-quality code that is readable, tested, documented, and maintainable
• Participate in design reviews and mentor engineers across the team
• Ensure privacy, security, and compliance across all application logic and data handling

Job Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Proven experience building and shipping complex products in high-velocity environments
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one additional backend programming language
• Experience with algorithms, APIs, data structures, and software design patterns
• Experience building systems on major cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Experience with containerization and CI/CD pipelines
• Hands-on experience building production systems on top of LLMs including tool-calling, RAG, multi-step reasoning, and context management preferred
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration frameworks and MCP integrations preferred
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, token economics, and LLM evaluation pipelines preferred
• Experience building customer-facing AI platforms or developer tools at scale preferred
• Background in security-conscious engineering and responsible AI guardrails preferred
• Strong communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams
• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or regulated environments preferred

Mandatory Requirement: Applicants selected for this position will be subject to a Government Security Investigation and must meet eligibility for access to classified information, Public Trust.

The above information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees in this classification. It is not designed to contain or to be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of the employee assigned to this job.

Advanced Resource Technology, Inc. is committed to a work environment free of all forms of discrimination and member of DHS E-Verify Program.

Advanced Resource Technology, Inc. recruits and hires without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, military status, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Equal Opportunity Employer, including disabled and veterans.