C2C Job opportunity: AI/ML Engineer at Phoenix, AZ

Role: AI/ML Engineer
Location: Phoenix, AZ (HYBRID)

Duration: Long Term Contract
Rate: $55/hr C2C

Note: Must interview onsite for 2nd round interview

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced AI/ML Engineer to design, build, and operate AI/ML infrastructure and agentic systems. This role involves developing MCP servers and agents, integrating LLMs, and implementing RAG pipelines for production environments.

Key Responsibilities

•        Design, build and operate MCP servers and MCP agents that host, orchestrate and monitor AI/agent workloads.

•        Develop agentic AI, prompt engineering patterns, LLM integrations and developer tooling for production use.

•        Own deployment, scaling, reliability and cost-efficiency on Kubernetes/Docker and Google Cloud with automated CI/CD

•        Design and implement RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines and integrations with vector stores and retrieval tooling; use LangChain and Langfuse for orchestration, chaining, and observability.

Core Responsibilities

•        Implement and maintain MCP server and agent code, APIs, and SDKs for model access and agent orchestration.

•        Design agent behavior, workflows and safety guards for agentic AI systems.

•        Create, test and iterate prompt templates, evaluation harnesses and grounding/chain of thought strategies.

•        Integrate LLMs and model providers (self-hosted and cloud APIs) with unified adapters and telemetry.

•        Build developer tooling: CLI, local runner, simulators, and debugging tools for agents and prompts.

•        Containerize services (Docker), manage orchestration (Kubernetes/GKE), and optimize nodes, autoscaling and resource requests.

•        Ensure observability: logging, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerting and SLOs for model infra and agents.

•        Create runbooks, playbooks and incident response procedures; reduce MTTR and perform postmortems.

•        Design and maintain RAG workflows: document chunking, embeddings, vector indexing, retrieval strategies, re ranking and context injection.

•        Integrate and instrument Lang Chain for composable chains, agents and tooling; use Langfuse (or equivalent tracing) to capture prompts, model calls, RAG traces and evaluation telemetry.

Required Skills & Experience

•        5+ years of Strong Software Engineering (Python/NodeJS), system design and production service experience.

•        2+ years of Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and agent frameworks.

•        2+ years of Experience Practical experience implementing RAG: embeddings, vector DBs and retrieval tuning.

•        2+ years of Experience with LangChain patterns and with toolchain telemetry (Langfuse or similar) for prompt/model traceability.

•        5+ years of Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD and infrastructure as code experience.

•        2+ years of Experience with Practical experience with Google Cloud Platform services

•        2+ years of Experience with Observability, testing, and security best practices for distributed systems.

•        2+ years of Experience with evaluating and mitigating retrieval/augmentation failures, hallucinations, and leakage risks in RAG systems.

•        Familiarity with vendor and open-source vector stores and embedding providers