
AI Engineer
Nelnet, Inc.12 days ago
Centennial, CO, USAEntry Level / Mid Level
Base Salary
$95k - $130k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and deploy LLM-powered agents using tool use, orchestration, multi-step reasoning, and human-in-the-loop patterns.
- Operate production agents by monitoring behavior, diagnosing failures, tuning prompts and tools, and managing model and dependency upgrades.
- Build evaluation suites with offline test sets, LLM-as-judge scoring, regression testing, and online metrics.
- Instrument agents and use observability data covering traces, tool calls, token usage, latency, cost, and outcome quality.
- Design retrieval and context strategies including RAG, structured data access, caching, chunking, and ranking.
- Build and maintain tools, APIs, and connectors for safe and reliable interaction with internal systems and data.
- Develop scalable AI pipelines and services on AWS using Terraform and automated deployment practices.
- Implement safety controls, validation, access boundaries, and audit trails for a regulated environment.
- Partner with teams to identify agent use cases, create reusable frameworks and standards, document systems, track agent tooling, and mentor team members.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain a U.S. 6C Security Clearance.
- At least 2 years of experience in machine learning engineering, AI engineering, software engineering, or related roles.
- Demonstrated experience building multi-step agentic systems with large language models, including tool calling and orchestration.
- Hands-on experience evaluating LLM and agent systems through evaluation-set design and result interpretation.
- Experience deploying and supporting AI or machine learning systems in production environments.
- Experience with retrieval-augmented generation and other methods for grounding models in enterprise data.
- Strong Python programming skills and working knowledge of AWS AI services, agent frameworks, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes.
- Strong machine learning fundamentals, statistical reasoning, analytical problem-solving, communication, organization, and ability to lead end-to-end product development.
Benefits
- Hybrid work environment with a standard 24/16 in-office/work-from-home schedule for associates within 30 miles of an office, subject to manager discretion.
- Medical, dental, vision, HSA and FSA benefits, earned time off, 401(k) and student loan repayment, life and AD&D insurance, employee assistance, employee stock purchase, tuition reimbursement, incentive pay, disability coverage, and wellness programming.
- The role is currently unavailable to external candidates residing in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, or Washington.