Senior LLM Engineer (Remote, Newcastle)

Blacksmith Agency LLC; Newcastle; Remote; ZAR 900,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Blacksmith Agency is seeking a Senior LLM Engineer to own and ship our internal automation roadmap. You will build production LLM and agent systems used daily by the team; this is a builder role, not research.

You will integrate WordPress, Figma, Google Workspace, Slack and MCP servers, and you will not train models. We hire engineers who have shipped an LLM system to production and can walk us through it in detail: what it did, how it was built, what broke and what they changed.

Qualifications

• Track record shipping production LLM systems with real users.
• 2+ years building production software in Python or TS/Node.js.
• Hands-on tooling, evals and failure handling with retries and human approvals.
• Experience REST APIs and cloud deployment.

Responsibilities

• Build agents and workflows with tool use and function calling on AI platforms.
• Develop evals and guardrails to prevent unsafe or wrong actions.
• Create integrations to WordPress, Figma, Google Workspace, Slack and MCP servers.
• Develop internal tools that save time in delivery, sales ops and PM.

Skills

Python

TypeScript/Node.js

Production LLM

REST APIs

Tools

WordPress

Figma

Google Workspace

Slack

Job description

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency is building AI into every part of how we work. As Senior LLM Engineer at Blacksmith, you own and ship our internal automation roadmap: production LLM and agent systems that real people on our team use every day. This is a builder role, not research. You will not train models.

Blacksmith Agency

• Engineering
• Full time, your only job
• Remote (Latin America and South Africa)

About The Role

Blacksmith Agency is building AI into every part of how we work. As Senior LLM Engineer at Blacksmith, you own and ship our internal automation roadmap: production LLM and agent systems that real people on our team use every day. This is a builder role, not research. You will not train models.

We hire engineers who have already shipped an LLM system to production and can walk us through it in detail: what it did, how it was built, what broke and what they changed. This is a full-time seat and it has to be your only job.

What You Will Build

• Agents and workflows with tool use and function calling on Anthropic and OpenAI, with a framework or plain APIs.
• Evals that prove a change made things better, and guardrails that stop a model taking a wrong or unsafe action.
• Integrations connecting WordPress, Figma, Google Workspace, Slack and our internal systems, including MCP servers.
• Internal tools that take measurable hours off delivery, sales operations and project management.

What You Bring

• 2+ years building production software in Python or TypeScript / Node.js.
• At least one LLM or agent system you built yourself that ran in production with real users.
• Hands-on tool use, evals and failure handling: validating model output, retries, human approval.
• REST APIs, webhooks and cloud deployment.
• Strong spoken English. You will talk through technical decisions on live calls with a US team.

Not a fit if

• You freelance or contract for other clients and would keep them alongside this job.
• Your LLM work is demos, tutorials or chat prompting, or your focus is model training and research.