Lead AI/ML Backend Engineer
First seen by Alion on Oct 29, 2026.
About Us:
We're building the next generation of AI-powered business software, and we're looking for people who want to shape that future with us. With Lumen, we're reimagining how users interact with CRM - moving beyond screens, menus and dashboards to an intelligent interface where users can simply ask AI to take actions, retrieve knowledge, generate insights and get work done. With Agent Studio, we're enabling businesses to build, test and deploy their own AI agents for real-world workflows. And with Invorto, we're bringing AI to voice, allowing businesses to create intelligent voice agents tailored to their customer and operational use cases.
What makes this especially exciting is the stage and scale of the opportunity. You'll get to work on genuinely hard problems across LLMs, agents, reasoning, orchestration, voice AI, evaluation, reliability and enterprise security - not as isolated experiments, but as products used in real business workflows. You'll have the opportunity to build zero-to-one, own meaningful parts of the product end-to-end, work closely with customers, experiment rapidly, and see your work reach production at scale.
Why join now?:
Because the playbook for enterprise AI is still being written. You won't just be implementing someone else's roadmap - you'll help define the product, architecture and experiences that become that playbook. Expect high ownership, fast iteration, hard technical and product problems, direct customer impact, and the chance to build AI systems that have to work reliably in the real world - not just in a demo.
About the Role:
We are looking for a Lead AI/ML Backend Engineer to help build the core intelligence layer powering Lumen and Agent Studio. You will design and ship production-grade backend systems that integrate LLMs into real agentic workflows - taking actions, retrieving knowledge and generating insights inside a live CRM product used by real businesses. This is a hands-on, build-focused role with direct ownership of systems that ship to production.
What You'll Do:
- Design, build and scale backend services in Python that power LLM-driven and agentic features within Lumen and Agent Studio.
- Build and productionize agentic AI systems - including planning, tool use, orchestration, memory and multi-step task execution.
- Integrate LLMs into core product workflows, focusing on reliability, latency, cost and correctness at production scale.
- Build robust APIs and services that connect AI agents with CRM data, business logic and third-party systems.
- Own evaluation, testing and monitoring for AI features to ensure they behave reliably in real-world, not just demo, conditions.
- Collaborate closely with product, design and other engineers to take features from zero to one and iterate rapidly based on real usage and customer feedback.
- Work directly with customers and customer-facing teams to understand real workflows, debug issues and translate feedback into product and engineering decisions.
What We're Looking For:
- 4-6 years of professional backend engineering experience, with strong hands-on Python skills.
- Design and build LLM-powered agentic systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or CrewAI to automate complex, multi-step workflows.
- Should be hands-on with traditional Machine learning frameworks like Pytorch, Scikit-learn.
- Solid understanding of API design, backend architecture, databases and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Familiarity with LLM orchestration concepts - prompting, tool/function calling, RAG, agent frameworks, evaluation and guardrails.
- Comfort working in a fast-paced, ambiguous, zero-to-one environment where you'll be defining as much as building.
- Strong communication skills - this is a customer-facing role, and you will be expected to clearly articulate technical concepts, decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers.
Good to Have:
- Experience with enterprise security, reliability or observability practices for AI systems.
- Prior experience working on CRM, SaaS or other enterprise business software.
- Exposure to voice AI or real-time systems.
Skills
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Python, Agentic AI, Generative AI, LangChain, PyTorch, Scikit-Learn