AI Engineer (Remote)

Title: AI Engineer Location: Houston, Texas Type: Direct Hire Salary: $135,000 Summary: The AI Engineer will work with AI Sandbox, the dedicated environment for prototype, evaluate, and de-risk emerging AI capabilities before they enter production. This role exists to move fast: turning business ideas into working proofs-of-concept, -testing new models and tools, and producing the evidence, of what to scale, what to shelve, and what to integrate into core systems. This high-autonomy, high-curiosity role is for someone who thrives in ambiguity and enjoys learning new technologies week after week and sharing what they find with others. Duties: Design, develop, and deploy functional prototypes of AI-driven solutions within accelerated timelines, spanning use cases such as document understanding, generative conversational interfaces, agent-based workflows, summarization, enterprise search, and predictive analytics. Evaluate new foundation models, frameworks (LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, etc.), and AI platforms (Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI, Anthropic, Copilot Studio). Maintain a safe, isolated sandbox environment with appropriate guardrails for data, cost, and access. This role is expected to evolve over time as organizational needs and priorities change; therefore, the responsibilities outlined above are not all-inclusive. Define success criteria, benchmarks, and evaluation harnesses for each experiment. Produce clear, evidence-based recommendations: what works, what doesn't, what it would cost to scale, and what risks need to be mitigated. Document key insights and lessons learned to enable broader team and business stakeholders to effectively leverage and scale these capabilities. Partner with the Application Development team to harden and transition promising prototypes into production-grade systems. Work directly with business stakeholders to understand problems, demo possibilities, and shape demand. Contribute to the development and advancement of responsible AI practices, with a focus on data privacy, security, bias mitigation, hallucination management, and human-in-the-loop design principles. Run internal demos, lunch-and-learns, and writeups that raise AI literacy across IT and business. Stay current on the AI landscape; bring back insights from research, vendor briefings, and the developer community. Requirements: 3+ years of software engineering or applied ML experience, with at least 1 year hands-on with generative AI / LLM-based systems. Strong Python skills; comfort with REST APIs, vector databases, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experience with at least one major AI platform (Azure OpenAI / Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock). Demonstrated ability to ship prototypes quickly and communicate results to non-technical audiences. Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate between technical and business audiences. Preferred experience with agent frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, and tool-use patterns. Preferred experience with Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Platform AI Builder, or similar low-code AI tooling. Preferred familiarity with MLOps / LLMOps practices (evaluation, observability, cost tracking). Preferred comfort working without a detailed spec — turning a vague business question into a testable experiment. Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or related field; equivalent experience considered. Show more Show less