Talascend is currently seeking an AI Agentic Engineer for a contract opportunity with our client in Glendale, Arizona.
Overview
The role involves designing, building, and operating enterprise-level agentic AI and decision intelligence solutions on Microsoft Azure, supporting complex business requirements and ensuring secure, explainable, and scalable AI capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Design and build production-grade single-agent and multi-agent systems capable of reasoning, planning, tool usage, and workflow execution in Azure AI Foundry.
- Architect scalable generative AI solutions leveraging Azure AI services, including Azure OpenAI and Azure Search.
- Develop retrieval-augmented generation architectures with structured and unstructured enterprise data, including embeddings, vector search, and citations.
- Create secure integrations between AI agents and enterprise systems using APIs, relational databases, and event-driven services.
- Design natural language to SQL capabilities, ensuring accuracy, explainability, and secure data access.
- Define semantic-layer strategies for enterprise data understanding and develop decision intelligence systems combining data, analytics, and AI reasoning.
- Establish reusable frameworks for impact analysis, dependencies, prioritization, and decision traceability.
- Ensure AI-generated recommendations are explainable, grounded, and aligned with business objectives.
- Implement evaluation methodologies for response quality, reasoning, and relevance, integrated into CI/CD processes.
- Establish guardrails for Responsible AI, including safety, privacy, grounding, and human-in-the-loop escalation protocols.
- Define governance, security, safety, transparency, and compliance standards for AI solutions.
- Implement observability and monitoring frameworks for AI applications, focusing on quality, performance, reliability, and cost metrics.
- Optimize solutions for cost and latency through model selection, engineering, caching, and workload sizing.
- Drive scalable, cloud-native AI platform architecture using modern DevOps and MLOps practices.
- Define technical standards and frameworks for AI agents and decision-support applications.
- Mentor engineering teams on AI best practices, architecture, and enterprise integration.
- Collaborate with stakeholders and data teams to develop AI-ready data products and semantic models.
- Stay current with emerging AI technologies and evaluate their applicability within enterprise environments.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field; Master's preferred
- 8+ years of relevant software engineering experience
- 3+ years of hands-on experience developing generative AI, machine learning, or LLM-based applications, including agentic AI
- Strong proficiency in Python; working knowledge of TypeScript/Node.js or similar languages
- Experience designing and deploying cloud applications on Azure
- Hands-on experience with Azure AI services, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, and Azure Search
- Experience with agent frameworks such as Microsoft Agent Framework, Semantic Kernel, LangGraph, or AutoGen
- Experience building natural language to SQL solutions and decision intelligence systems
- Knowledge of LLMOps, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, and observability tools for AI applications
- Familiarity with core Azure platform services like AKS, Azure Functions, API Management, Azure SQL, and Cosmos DB
- Understanding of REST APIs, secure integrations, relational and NoSQL databases, and data pipelines
- Experience with enterprise-scale secure AI deployments, including data privacy and compliance
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills
Preferred / Nice-to-Have Qualifications
- Experience with Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, or Azure Data Factory
- Exposure to Copilot Studio, Power Platform, or Teams-based agent solutions
- Experience with model fine-tuning, prompt caching, and token/cost optimization
- Supply chain domain knowledge or familiarity with ERP systems like Oracle EBS or SAP
- Front-end development experience with React and TypeScript
- Microsoft certifications such as Azure AI Engineer Associate or Azure Solutions Architect
This is a full-time contract position based in Glendale, Arizona.
We thank all applicants for their interest. However, only those qualified individuals who closely meet the qualifications of the position will be contacted. The details of the position are only a summary, other duties may be assigned as necessary.
Background Check and Drug Screen may be required.
Talascend is an Equal Opportunity Employer that recruits and hires qualified candidates without regard to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, disability, or veteran status.