{"id":1121224,"url":"https://alion.io/job/upwork-sr-software-ai-engineer","title":"Sr Software AI Engineer","company":{"id":3606,"name":"Upwork","domain":"upwork.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/upwork","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":true,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":80,"open_postings":33,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":20,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"contractor","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":46000,"max_usd":120000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":2365},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-22T18:38:11Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-22","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T03:49:10Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":46,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":46},"description":"Client is one of the world's largest e-commerce retailers of health, wellness, and beauty products, serving customers in more than 185 countries. With a catalog of over 30,000 products and global logistics infrastructure, they help millions of people live healthier lives every day. They are growing its engineering organization around an AI-first mandate: using AI not just as a product feature but as the foundation for how they build software, serve customers, and operate the business.\n They are looking for a Sr. Software AI Engineer who will write production code, own features end-to-end from spec through deployment, operations, and observability, and participate in on-call rotation for what the team ships. There is no handoff to a separate ops or reliability function; engineers own the full lifecycle. Test automation is built into the shipping process using AI-driven tooling and the golden path.\nBuild the GenAI-powered product experiences and the shared AI platform infrastructure that powers them. This includes RAG pipelines over the catalog and customer reviews, LLM-driven personalization, a conversational Wellness Agent, agentic workflow systems, and the evals and MLOps layer that makes AI features production-grade and repeatable. Specializations within this track include: RAG and personalization, agent framework and tool use, evals and guardrails, and LLM application development for internal business functions such as marketing automation and BI agents.\nWhat you will do:\nDesign, build, and operate production AI features: RAG pipelines, LLM-driven recommendations, conversational agents, or agentic workflow automation.\nBuild the shared AI platform layer: retrieval infrastructure, eval frameworks, model monitoring, guardrails, and observability.\nWrite LLM applications and integrations with marketing platforms, BI tools, or customer-facing product surfaces.\nEvaluate model and feature quality using structured eval frameworks; iterate on prompts, retrieval strategies, and model selection using data.\nUse AI-driven SDLC tooling such as Claude Code as a daily practice for both AI and non-AI code.\nCoordinate with the Personalization team to align GenAI product features with existing ML personalization signals.\nDocument AI system design decisions, evaluation results, and operational lessons in the shared knowledge base.\nOwn the observability of AI systems you build: latency, cost, quality drift, and error rates; participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.\n 8+ years of software engineering experience. Fully autonomous; drives technical decisions within the team; mentors junior engineers.\nPython proficiency; comfortable building and operating production LLM applications.\nHands-on experience with at least one specialization: RAG and retrieval systems, LLM evaluation, agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar), or LLM-based workflow automation.\nUnderstanding of prompt engineering, context window management, and LLM output quality tradeoffs.\nFamiliarity with vector databases, embedding models, or semantic search.\nAI-driven SDLC : hands-on experience shipping production code with AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor. The bar is not awareness; it is daily use in delivering real software.\nFull-stack awareness: comfortable contributing across layers of the stack when needed; purely single-layer specialists are not the target profile.\nProduction ownership: experience owning features end-to-end from spec through deployment,\nNICE TO HAVE\nExposure to MLOps tooling or model deployment pipelines.\nContributions to internal developer tooling, golden path standards, or SDLC process improvements.\nExperience with e-commerce platforms, product catalogs, or high-traffic consumer applications.\nExposure to MLOps tooling or model deployment pipelines.\nExperience working in distributed teams across different time zones / geographies.\nTrack record of documenting architectural decisions, writing RFCs, or contributing to engineering wikis.\n Selected candidates will be invited to take part in several rounds of interviews.\nThe role is expected to be full time and ideal candidates should be looking for a long term engagement.\nA background check will be required as part of the onboarding process.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4312,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Mexico","iso":"MX","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Freelance & Talent Marketplaces"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T19:09:48Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":16,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.466,"p_room":0.35,"age_days":46,"expected_fill_days":20,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/upwork-sr-software-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/upwork-sr-software-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T05:58:37Z","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":12943,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"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":3606},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3606"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fupwork-sr-software-ai-engineer"},{"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%2Fupwork-sr-software-ai-engineer"},{"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%2Fupwork-sr-software-ai-engineer"},{"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/upwork-sr-software-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fupwork-sr-software-ai-engineer"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1121224}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"upwork.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1121224},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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