Job Title: Lead AI Platform Engineer
Location: St. Louis, MO (On-site)
Employment Type: Contract (Only W2 through ZipStaff)
About the Opportunity
ZipStaff is seeking a Lead AI Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate production AI solutions for a major energy and utilities organization.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on agentic workflows, RAG architectures, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability. You will establish reusable AI patterns, raise engineering standards, and deliver enterprise-grade AI systems that are reliable, measurable, and integrated with existing APIs, applications, and data sources.
What You’ll Do:
- Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions.
- Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines.
- Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures.
- Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability.
- Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities.
- Develop automated testing and regression validation processes.
- Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise applications, and data sources.
- Design reusable AI patterns, frameworks, and components that increase platform scalability and team productivity.
- Establish engineering best practices and contribute to code reviews.
- Research and adopt emerging AI technologies where they provide business value.
- Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into AI solutions.
Required Qualifications:
- 7–8+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade production software.
- Strong Python development skills.
- Experience building, deploying, and operating production AI systems.
- Experience designing and implementing RAG solutions.
- Hands-on experience with Databricks.
- Hands-on experience with LangGraph or similar agent orchestration frameworks.
- Experience building AI workflows that leverage tools, APIs, and external systems.
- Experience with AI evaluation frameworks and quality measurement.
- Experience implementing AI observability and tracing solutions.
- Understanding of agent architecture patterns, prompt engineering, and LLM evaluation techniques.
- Experience with AWS in production environments.
- Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.
- Experience with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices
- Knowledge of secure coding principles and responsible AI practices.
- Experience collaborating within Agile software development teams.
- Ability to work on-site in St. Louis, MO.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or in the future.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with AgentBricks.
- Experience with Microsoft Copilot extensibility and agent development.
- Experience with LangChain and related frameworks.
- Experience with MCP integrations.
- Experience with vector databases and semantic search.
- Experience with AWS Bedrock.
- Experience with OpenTelemetry, LangSmith, Grafana, MLflow, DeepEval, or similar tooling.
- Experience deploying multi-agent systems.
- Experience with Terraform.
- AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, or AI-related certifications.
About ZipStaff:
ZipStaff partners with leading organizations to connect skilled technology professionals with high-impact contract opportunities. We focus on quality matches and long-term success.
To apply, please submit your resume highlighting your production AI systems experience, Python, RAG, Databricks, and LangGraph (or similar) agent orchestration background.