Staff AI Platform Engineer

Thornton Tomasetti; Illinois; On-site; USD 129,000 - 259,000; Full time

Job summary

Abbott Park, IL is seeking a senior AI Platform Engineer to drive architecture and delivery for Abbott's enterprise AI Platform. You will set technical direction, partner with the Tech Lead, and serve as escalation point for consuming teams.

Responsibilities include designing platform capabilities, ensuring security, observability, SLOs, incident response, and mentoring engineers. The role is onsite in Illinois.

Qualifications

• 8–10 years of software engineering or platform engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise AI/GenAI platforms or comparable developer/data/ML platforms in production at scale.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one of TypeScript, Go, or Java, including distributed systems, API design, testing, and secure SDLC.
• Deep technical knowledge in model gateways, GenAI runtimes, RAG, agent/model registries, evaluation, observability/ tracing, guardrails, or platform governance.
• Experience with containers/orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cloud services, and production SLO/on-call practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design of major platform capabilities with minimal oversight.
• Document architecture decisions and tradeoffs for platform control plane and SDKs.
• Drive platform observability, tracing, and cost signals; set security guardrails and responsible-AI controls.
• Own platform reliability engineering: define SLOs, lead incident response, and perform root-cause analysis.
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers; collaborate with Product Manager to sequence roadmap.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

TypeScript/Go/Java

CI/CD

Security SDLC

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Cloud services

Job description

## Staff AI Platform EngineerApply: United States - Illinois - Abbott Park: United States > Chicago : Willis Tower Building 233 S Wacker Dr.: Full time: Posted Today: 31164553Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare, with leading businesses and products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutritionals and branded generic medicines. Our 122,000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.## **JOB DESCRIPTION:****Working at Abbott**At Abbott, you can do work that matters, grow, and learn, care for yourself and your family, be your true self, and live a full life. You’ll also have access to:* Career development with an international company where you can grow the career you dream of.* Employees can qualify for free medical coverage in our Health Investment Plan (HIP) PPO medical plan in the next calendar year.* An excellent retirement savings plan with a high employer contribution* Tuition reimbursement, the Freedom 2 Save student debt program, and FreeU education benefit - an affordable and convenient path to getting a bachelor’s degree.* A company recognized as a great place to work in dozens of countries worldwide and named one of the most admired companies in the world by Fortune.* A company that is recognized as one of the best big companies to work for as well as the best place to work for diversity, working mothers, female executives, and scientists.**The Opportunity**A senior individual-contributor engineering role that drives architecture and delivery for significant portions of **Abbott's enterprise AI Platform**. This role sets technical direction for one or more platform capability areas, partners closely with the Tech Lead/Architect on reference architecture decisions, and is a primary technical escalation point for consuming teams. Expected to operate with substantial autonomy and to raise the technical bar for the team.**What You'll Do*** Lead the design of major platform capabilities (e.g., multi-provider model gateway, GenAI runtime, agent/model registries, evaluation and tracing pipelines) with minimal oversight, in partnership with the Tech Lead/Architect.* Make and document architecture decisions and tradeoffs for the platform's control plane, paved-road SDKs, and developer experience, weighing scalability, security, cost, and operability.* Drive platform observability and evaluation strategy, including distributed tracing, quality/drift/latency/cost signals, and standards other engineers build against.* Lead implementation of security, guardrails, and responsible-AI controls (PII/PHI handling, prompt-injection defenses, identity-on-behalf-of, policy enforcement) across platform services.* Own platform reliability engineering: define SLOs, lead incident response for high-severity issues, drive root-cause analysis, and improve resilience.* Set engineering standards through architecture reviews, design docs, and code reviews; identify and resolve systemic technical risk before it blocks delivery.* Make build-versus-buy and vendor recommendations with cost/tradeoff analysis, in partnership with the Tech Lead/Architect and Product Manager.* Mentor and technically develop mid-level and junior engineers; act as a technical lead on cross-team initiatives without formal people-management responsibility.* Partner with the Product Manager, AI Platform to sequence roadmap, and directly engage senior stakeholders across AI/Agentic Engineering, Applied Data Science, and security on feasibility and design.**Education and Experience You’ll Bring****Required Qualifications*** 8–10 years of software engineering, platform engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure experience, with a track record of owning significant technical scope.* Hands-on experience designing and operating **enterprise AI/GenAI platforms** or comparable developer, data, or ML platforms in production at scale.* Strong software engineering ability in Python and at least one of **TypeScript, Go, or Java, including distributed systems, API design, testing, and secure SDLC.*** Deep technical understanding of at least two of: **model gateways, GenAI runtimes, RAG, agent/model registries, evaluation, observability/tracing, guardrails, or platform governance.*** Experience with **containers and orchestration** (e.g., Kubernetes), infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cloud services, and production SLO/on-call practices, including leading incident response.* Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent professional experience.* Demonstrated ability to drive technical decisions with significant autonomy, influence engineers outside a direct reporting line, and communicate clearly with technical leadership.**Preferred Qualifications*** Experience building enterprise GenAI or agent platforms using capabilities such as multi-model routing, agent registries, prompt management, evaluation harnesses, and **GenAI tracing.*** Experience in a highly regulated environment such as health tech, med-tech, or life sciences, with GxP, HIPAA, validation, and change-control constraints.* Experience implementing security, responsible-AI, privacy, policy, or cost/FinOps controls for shared AI infrastructure.* Experience with open standards and tooling such as MCP, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platform engineering practices; prior informal technical leadership or mentoring track record.**Misc:** This is an onsite role at Abbott location in **IL.** This is not a remote role/opportunity.* **Apply Now*** **Learn more about our health and wellness benefits, which provide the security to help you and your family live full lives:** www.abbottbenefits.com* Follow your career aspirations to Abbott for diverse opportunities with a company that can help you build your future and live your best life. Abbott is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to employee diversity.* Connect with us at www.abbott.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Abbott, and on Twitter @AbbottNews.**The base pay for this position is**$129,300.00 – $258,700.00