Job Title
Principal AI Consultant
Location
McLean, VA (open to Richmond, VA)
- Prefers local candidates
Schedule
Hybrid (on-site and remote mix)
Type
W2 Contract Only | 7?Month Contract (Possible Hire)
Pay Range
Pay Rate: $75–$80/hour
Summary
We are seeking a high-caliber Principal AI Engineer for a contract engagement focused on accelerating the implementation of Agentic AI solutions. This is a true hands-on builder role, ideal for an experienced engineer who thrives at taking generative AI concepts from prototype to production-grade autonomous systems. You will work at the intersection of Generative AI, full-stack Python development, and AWS cloud architecture to deliver scalable, secure, and measurable AI-driven solutions.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and deploy agentic, multi-agent workflows using LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, CrewAI) to automate complex business processes and drive measurable efficiency gains.
- Build and optimize production-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using Amazon Bedrock and vector databases (e.g., OpenSearch, Pinecone), with clear performance, latency, and accuracy targets.
- Develop scalable FastAPI backends to make LLM outputs actionable for end users; partner closely with frontend teams on React-based AI interfaces and streaming UI components.
- Implement Responsible AI guardrails, including prompt safety, output filtering, bias evaluation, content moderation, and compliance controls for enterprise-grade deployments.
- Establish engineering excellence through automated AI evaluation frameworks (e.g., Ragas, DeepEval), observability and tracing tools (e.g., LangSmith, OpenTelemetry), and CI/CD pipelines for LLM prompts and code.
Required Qualifications
- Must have 10+ years of overall software engineering experience.
- Must have 7+ years of professional backend development with Python.
- Must have 2+ years of hands-on implementation with LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT, Llama).
- Must have 5+ years designing and architecting AWS cloud-native applications.
- Strong experience building production AI systems, not just experiments or proofs of concept.
Technical Stack
- AI / GenAI: Claude, GPT-series, Hugging Face Transformers, PEFT, LangChain, LangGraph
- Agents: Autonomous tool use, function calling, state management
- Backend: Python 3.10+, FastAPI, Pydantic, async programming
- Cloud: Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda (Serverless AI), RDS / pgvector
- Observability: AI-specific monitoring, tracing, and evaluation tooling
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