{"id":2572194,"url":"https://alion.io/job/applaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2","title":"Senior AI Engineer (LLMs & Agentic AI)","company":{"id":5319,"name":"Applaudo","domain":"applaudostudios.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/applaudo-studios","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mexico City, Mexico"],"countries":["MX"],"hiring_countries":["MX"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":50000,"max_usd":129000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":2102},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":true},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":true},{"name":"NLP","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-14T19:39:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-19T15:43:14Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"About You\nYou are a Senior AI Engineer passionate about building production-grade LLM applications and agentic AI systems. You thrive in collaborative environments where you design, implement, and optimize AI capabilities that power conversational experiences and intelligent workflows.\nYou enjoy solving complex AI challenges, integrating cutting-edge LLM technologies, and continuously improving production systems through experimentation, evaluation, and engineering best practices. You're comfortable making production design decisions autonomously within a small, lightly-managed team, and defending those decisions directly to engineering leadership.\nNote: This role operates under a contractor model and requires availability to work in the U.S. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).\nYou Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies:\nBachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience.\nStrong proficiency in Python and software engineering best practices for production backend services (APIs, async I/O, typing/schema validation, error handling, and testing).\nStrong SQL skills working with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake preferred).\nHands-on experience building production-grade LLM and agentic AI applications.\n Hands-on experience building and deploying MCP servers in production (server-side, consumed by other users or systems), including tool and resource definitions, context management, and multi-step orchestration.\n Understanding of MCP transports (stdio vs. Streamable HTTP) and authentication/authorization patterns for remote servers (OAuth/OIDC, scoped and resource-level access).\nExperience integrating hosted LLM APIs such as Anthropic and OpenAI into production environments.\nExperience with prompt engineering, prompt versioning, fallback strategies, and cost/latency optimization, with direct ownership of these concerns in production.\nExperience designing intent classification and routing solutions for natural language applications, resolving user intent into the correct API and data-source calls.\nExperience building conversational AI solutions or multi-API orchestration workflows.\nExperience developing LLM evaluation methodologies and demonstrated ability to reverse-engineer and work within a partially documented, brownfield Python codebase.\nStrong collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills.\nDemonstrated ability to explain your own technical work in first-person depth under sustained technical questioning, clearly distinguishing what you personally built, what you contributed to, and what you only observed.\n Strong spoken English (B2+) to discuss technical scenarios live with US-based stakeholders.\nNice to Have:\nExperience deploying, fine-tuning, and evaluating open-source models using Hugging Face.\nExperience with GPU acceleration and inference optimization.\nExperience implementing MLOps practices, including CI/CD, observability, and reproducible pipelines.\nExperience with vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).\nApplied NLP experience.\nExperience building client-facing AI products.\nAWS experience (Batch, ECS, Lambda, SQS).\nYou Will Be Accountable for the Following Responsibilities:\nBuild and maintain MCP servers, tool and resource definitions, and context management capabilities.\nDesign and implement intent evaluation, classification, and routing workflows, including orchestrating resolution into the correct API and data-source calls, with aggregation across multiple sources.\nIntegrate Anthropic and OpenAI models into production environments.\nManage prompt versioning, fallback strategies, and LLM performance optimization.\nDevelop and maintain evaluation frameworks to validate model quality and production performance.\nWrite SQL against model inputs and outputs to support evaluation and monitoring.\nSupport the backend behavior of the chat / MCP interface.\nWork within an existing, partially documented codebase, tracing behavior and making safe, incremental changes.\nCollaborate closely with software engineers and AI specialists to deliver production-ready AI solutions.\nParticipate in architecture discussions and contribute to AI platform design.\nContinuously improve AI systems through experimentation, optimization, and engineering best practices.\n Experience building production AI applications with Python and LLM technologies.\nMust have personally authored/built an MCP server deployed in production and used by other users or systems (not simply integrated, consumed, or built as a local proof of concept).\nHands-on brownfield experience, adding significant features to a production Python codebase.\nExperience designing and deploying conversational AI or agentic AI solutions.\nStrong experience with prompt engineering, LLM integrations, and evaluation methodologies.\n Strong spoken English (B2+)\n All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.\nAbout Us\nWe Are Engineered Different.\nAt Applaudo, talented people design, build, and scale meaningful, AI-powered solutions that create real business impact. As an AI-native organization, we collaborate across design, development, cloud, data, and artificial intelligence to turn ideas into scalable products that transform how companies operate, make decisions, and grow.\nWe are building a high-performance culture grounded in five values: Empowering Excellence, Collaborative Teamwork, Unsolicited Respect, Consistent Transparency, and Efficient Communication. These define how we work, how we support one another, and how we hold ourselves accountable.\nApplaudo is a place for people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and work alongside strong teams they are proud to belong to. Joining us means being part of an organization that is evolving intentionally, investing in modern ways of working, and leading AI-native transformation at scale.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5945,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Upper-Intermediate (B2)","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Mexico","iso":"MX","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","UI/UX Design","IT Outsourcing & Dedicated Teams","Web Development Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-14T23:11:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":27,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/applaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/applaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T18:55:41Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14925,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5319},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5319"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fapplaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fapplaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fapplaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/applaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fapplaudo-senior-ai-engineer-llms-agentic-ai-2"}]}