AI Engineer - Agentic AI Development - Contract - PST

AI Engineer Agentic AI Development

Location: Canada, US - PST timezone

Base Location: Seattle, WA
Work Arrangement: Hybrid preferred
Experience: 5 8 Years
Employment Type: Contract

Job Summary

We are seeking AI Engineers specializing in Agentic AI Development for one of our analytics clients, supporting a strategic AI initiative for a leading specialty retailer.

This is a highly hands-on engineering role focused on designing, building, evaluating, and deploying production-grade agentic AI systems that automate real-world business workflows. The ideal candidate will have strong software engineering fundamentals combined with recent hands-on experience developing agents, multi-agent systems, orchestration workflows, evaluation frameworks, and context-management solutions.

This is a high-visibility engagement requiring engineers who can independently take well-defined requirements through design, development, evaluation, and production deployment.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade AI agents and multi-agent orchestration systems.
• Develop agent orchestration patterns, multi-agent coordination, tool integrations, and workflows.
• Design and integrate tools used by agents, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) considerations where applicable.
• Build programmatic agent evaluation frameworks covering metrics, offline/online evaluations, and failure-mode analysis.
• Implement context engineering strategies including retrieval, context assembly, memory/state management, and context optimization.
• Design solutions considering token limits, latency, reliability, and LLM cost constraints.
• Develop production-ready code and own delivery across the full SDLC, including deployment.
• Work independently from client-defined requirements while collaborating closely with engineering teams and stakeholders.
• Contribute to engineering standards and GenAI development best practices across the broader team.

Required Skills & Experience

Software Engineering

• 5 8 years of overall software engineering experience.
• Strong experience building production-grade applications and owning solutions through deployment.
• Solid understanding of software architecture, APIs, integrations, testing, and production engineering.

Agentic AI / Generative AI

• Recent hands-on experience building and shipping agentic AI systems, ideally within the last 12 months.
• Experience beyond prototypes, POCs, or prompt experimentation; candidates should have built functional agent workflows or production systems.
• Strong understanding of modern foundation models and agentic architecture/design patterns.
• Experience with agent orchestration, tool calling, multi-agent coordination, and MCP concepts.

Agent Evaluation

• Practical experience designing and implementing agent/LLM evaluations.
• Experience with programmatic metrics, offline and online evaluations, and failure-mode analysis.

Context Engineering

• Hands-on experience with retrieval, context assembly, memory, and state management.
• Understanding of context-window, latency, performance, and cost trade-offs in production LLM applications.

Frameworks

• Experience with one or more agentic AI frameworks or SDKs such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Claude Agent SDK, or OpenAI agent development tooling.
• Ability to work framework-agnostically and apply transferable agentic architecture concepts.

Communication

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to operate independently from defined requirements and collaborate effectively with engineering and business stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Claude Agent SDK.
• Experience with LLM cost management and optimization.
• Strong stakeholder communication and requirements-translation skills.
• Retail or E-commerce domain experience.
• Experience working with customer journey, transaction, behavioral, or similar retail data.