Engineering Manager - Agentic AI
First seen by Alion on Sep 22, 2026.
Role & responsibilities :
Build the agentic AI tower from zero : agents in the execution path of customer care, retention and field operations orchestration, tool integration, eval harnesses, guardrails, cost control and hire the developer team.
Preferred candidate profile :
Strong backend/ML engineer - LLM application builder - led a small AI team or platform (8 - 12 years overall). The spine is software engineering; the last 2 - 3 years are production LLM systems.
Mandatory requirements :
- Shipped LLM-powered systems to PRODUCTION with real users - demos and POCs do not qualify.
- Agent patterns hands-on : tool/function calling, MCP-style integration, orchestration, structured outputs.
- Built evaluation harnesses and guardrails - can explain how they KNEW the system worked and what it cost.
- Strong engineering spine : Python and/or TypeScript/Java, APIs, queues, databases - an engineer first.
- Has hired and led engineers; built a team or practice from zero.
Nice to have :
- Claude/Anthropic API depth (or equivalent frontier-model platform mastery).
- Contact-center / voice-bot / WhatsApp-channel AI; RAG over messy enterprise data.
- LLM cost-and-latency engineering at scale; MLOps exposure.
Tech Stack :
Frontier LLM APIs (Claude-class), MCP / tool calling, RAG + vector stores, eval frameworks, Python + TypeScript, Kafka/REST plumbing, Kubernetes.
Skills
Python, TypeScript, LLM, Agentic AI, RAG, MLOps, Engineering Management, Artificial Intelligence