Applied AI Engineer

K&K Global Talent Solutions Inc. is an international recruiting agency that has been providing technical resources in the Canada and the USA region since 1993. They are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to build and deploy AI systems that serve real users at scale, requiring strong backend and cloud infrastructure experience.

Responsibilities:

• Must-Have Requirements
• Backend/Systems Experience
• 3+ years building production backend or distributed systems (pre-AI experience required)
• Production AI Systems
• Has shipped AI/LLM features serving real users at scale — not just prototypes or demos
• Agentic Systems
• Has built AI agents, skills, tools, or MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations
• Python
• Proficient for backend development
• Secondary Language
• Working knowledge of Go, TypeScript, or Rust
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Deep experience with AWS/GCP/Azure — cost optimization, compute decisions, not just deployment
• Container & Orchestration
• Hands-on with Docker and Kubernetes — can build, deploy, debug, and scale services themselves
• LLM Integration
• Understands token economics, context limits, rate limiting, structured outputs, API failure modes
• LLM Evaluation
• Understands how to evaluate LLM outputs and the inherent challenges (non-determinism, quality measurement, regression detection)
• Hands-On Engineer
• Not just an architect — writes code, debugs production issues, deploys their own work
• Preferred / Differentiators
• Built multi-step agentic workflows with tool use and function calling
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, Google ADK, OpenAI ADK)
• Built guardrails, fallbacks, or graceful degradation for AI systems
• Streaming inference and async agent orchestration
• Cost/latency optimization: caching, batching, prompt compression
• ML observability tools: Langfuse, Arize, Braintrust, W&B
• Retrieval systems (vector search, hybrid search) — as a tool, not the focus