7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on AI/ML or data engineering
Production agentic/LLM application experience — built and operated systems around LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI) serving real users: agents, tool-use, or orchestrated LLM workflows
Data engineering background — robust, scalable pipelines for AI/ML workloads
LLM operations experience — evals and observability for production LLM systems (quality, cost, latency)
Production retrieval experience — vector databases and/or search engines (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch)
Modern Python stack proficiency — FastAPI, Pydantic, async/await, modern dependency management
AI-native workflows — demonstrated ability to leverage Claude Code/Codex or similar agentic coding tools to accelerate development
Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS
US citizenship required (DoD contracting — IL4/IL5 environments — and FedRAMP compliance)
Deep agentic ecosystem experience — Agent Skills standards, custom MCP servers, agent SDKs across major vendors
Advanced RAG expertise — GraphRAG, agentic RAG, contextual retrieval, reranking strategies
Graph data experience — knowledge graphs, graph databases, or graph-based retrieval
Model selection & rightsizing — matching models to domain-specific use cases across quality, cost, and latency tradeoffs
Streaming data experience (Kafka, Kinesis) for real-time knowledge base updates
Research background, open-source contributions, or an advanced degree in ML/IR/NLP
Why Join Collaboration AI?
Real AI engineering, not a wrapper shop. Production agents, hybrid retrieval, continuous evals, and a roadmap heading into graph + agents — with the autonomy to shape how it's built
AI-native by default. We build with AI, not just for AI. Agentic coding tools (Claude Code/Codex/etc.), agent SDKs and harnesses, MCP servers, and Agent Skills standards are how we work daily — you'll both use and build them
Work that matters. Defense, public sector, and regulated industries — SOC 2 and NIST compliance, FedRAMP readiness, and customers whose missions demand AI they can trust
Small, senior team. Early-stage impact with your work visible from week one