Title: AI Engineer - Agentic Development
Location: Seattle, WA (Hybrid)
Duration: 6 months (possibility of extension)
JD:
About the Role
EXL is hiring two AI Engineers to join a strategic agentic AI engagement with a leading specialty retailer. This is a hands-on build role embedded with the client's engineering team, focused on shipping production agentic systems that automate real business workflows.
The role requires designing, building, and evaluating multi-agent systems - from agent orchestration and tool design through evaluation and context management. The right person is comfortable owning the full lifecycle of an agent's development: from design through production deployment, working from requirements the client has already scoped.
This is a short-term, high-visibility engagement with potential to extend or convert as the client's AI program grows.
What You'll Do
- Design and build production agents and multi-agent orchestration systems - not prototypes or one-off experiments.
- Apply sound judgment on agentic design trade-offs: orchestration patterns, multi-agent coordination, tool design, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration considerations.
- Build and run programmatic evaluations for agents: metrics, offline/online evals, and failure-mode analysis.
- Apply context engineering practices: context assembly, memory/state management, and context handling under token, latency, and cost constraints.
- Ship production-ready code through the full SDLC, working largely independently from requirements the client's team has already defined.
- Partner with client engineers and stakeholders; stay cognizant of end-customer and user experience even when requirements are handed off rather than gathered directly.
- Contribute to engineering standards and help raise the broader team's working fluency with generative AI by example.
- Software Engineering: 5+ years of experience with strong fundamentals - production-ready code, full SDLC ownership, and real deployment experience, not just development.
- Generative AI / Agentic Systems: Recent (within the last year), hands-on experience building and shipping agentic systems - open source or production - beyond experimentation.
- Foundation Models: Working knowledge of modern foundation models and current agentic design approaches and trade-offs.
- Evaluation: Practical experience with agent evaluation - programmatic metrics, offline/online evaluation, and failure-mode analysis.
- Context Engineering: Practical experience with retrieval, context assembly, and memory/state management under real constraints.
- Frameworks: Comfortable working framework-agnostic. Exposure to any of LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Claude Agent SDK, or the OpenAI Assistants API valued as evidence of transferable concepts, not a checklist requirement.
- Communication: Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable operating from client-defined requirements with minimal hand-holding.
- Hands-on experience specifically with the Claude Agent SDK.
- Experience with LLM cost management and optimization.
- Strong stakeholder communication and requirements-translation skills.
- Domain experience in Retail or E-commerce - customer journey data, transaction analytics, or similar.