Santander AI Lab - Frontier Agentic AI Engineer
Banco Santander, S.A.2 months ago
Santa Barbara, CA, USAMid Level / Senior
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and deploy production-grade agentic AI systems with multi-agent orchestration, memory, planning, tool use, and error recovery.
- Develop and fine-tune small and medium language models for regulated banking use cases, including evaluation frameworks and domain-specific benchmarks.
- Architect and implement MCP servers, A2A protocols, and federated API layers across multi-country infrastructure.
- Prototype hypotheses, architectures, code, functional demos, and one-pagers in two-week sprints.
- Collaborate with researchers, data scientists, and business stakeholders to translate technical concepts into banking value.
- Evaluate emerging research and tools and integrate them into the lab’s workflow when valuable.
- Produce clean, tested, observable code and own systems end-to-end through handoff for production scaling.
Requirements
- 4–8 years of software engineering or AI engineering experience, including at least 2 years building and maintaining LLM-powered systems in production environments.
- Hands-on experience designing and deploying complex multi-agent AI systems with memory management, stateful orchestration, tool use, multi-step planning, and failure recovery.
- Experience fine-tuning or adapting language models using techniques such as SFT, LoRA, or RLHF, including dataset curation and evaluation design.
- Demonstrated ability to independently deliver complete systems from architecture decisions through production-ready code.
- Experience building and consuming REST APIs and integrating AI systems with enterprise data sources, cloud services, and third-party platforms.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or an equivalent technical field.
- Advanced Python proficiency and experience with agentic AI frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or Semantic Kernel.
- Experience with Anthropic Claude API, OpenAI, and open-source models such as Llama and Mistral.
- Experience deploying and monitoring AI systems using AWS services including Bedrock, Lambda, SageMaker, and S3.
- Experience with model evaluation and observability tools or approaches such as LLM-as-judge, RAGAS, Promptfoo, or Langfuse.
- Experience developing production APIs with FastAPI or an equivalent framework.
- Experience with Docker, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Professional working proficiency in English and Spanish.
- Banking, fintech, or other regulated-industry experience is preferred.
- A Master’s degree or equivalent advanced qualification in AI, Machine Learning, or a related discipline is preferred.
- Exposure to Harness Engineering, MCP server implementation, SLM fine-tuning pipelines, knowledge graphs or GraphRAG, A2A/x402/AP2, Kubernetes, or Terraform is preferred.
Benefits
- Hybrid working model with some remote and onsite days and flexible hours.
- Access to hundreds of courses and Santander Open Academy learning resources.
- Opportunities to work with Anthropic, Sakana AI, AWS, CMU, ICMAT, and INRIA.
- Potential to publish qualifying work and contribute to research publications.
- Competitive salary with performance-based bonuses.
- Preferential banking terms, special loan interest rates, life insurance, and other financial benefits.
- BeHealthy global wellness program and access to medical centers at some facilities.
- Childcare support and family-friendly programs.
- Santander Contigo legal, emotional, and administrative advisory services for employees and families.
- Gym/WellHub membership, meal subsidy, parking, Madrid shuttle service, and employee discounts.
Categories
About Banco Santander, S.A.
Banco Santander, S.A. is a global bank providing retail and commercial banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth management, insurance, and payments for individuals, SMEs, corporates, and public institutions. Founded in 1857 and headquartered in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid), it operates across Europe and the Americas through local subsidiaries and digital brands like Openbank, and is publicly traded, including on the New York Stock Exchange.