Senior Agentic AI / AI Systems Engineer

Overview Item.com is seeking a senior hands-on engineer to lead the design and operation of reliable agentic and multi-agent AI systems. This role combines deep implementation ability with technical leadership, systems judgment, and production accountability.

Responsibilities

• Deliver resilient AI systems that support mission-critical business work.
• Create reusable patterns for evaluation, reliability, observability, governance, and cost control.
• Raise the technical bar through architecture, code reviews, mentoring, and incident learning.
• Lead design and implementation of agentic services and multi-agent workflows across models, tools, data sources, and human workflows.
• Define platform patterns for tool contracts, state, orchestration, evaluation, tracing, guardrails, and release management.

Minimum Requirements:

• Deep production software/systems engineering experience and demonstrated hands-on AI systems ownership.
• Evidence of operating distributed, AI/ML, or agentic systems at meaningful scale.
• Experience with evaluation pipelines, observability/tracing, security controls, deployment automation, and incident management.
• Ability to lead technical decisions without relying solely on a framework or vendor abstraction.
• Strong communication skills for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Requirements:

• Own reliability engineering: SLOs, fallback paths, incident response, root-cause analysis, and capacity/cost planning.
• Review designs and code; mentor engineers and establish engineering standards.
• Partner with security, platform, product, and operations leaders on safe deployment and change management.
• Make clear tradeoffs among performance, quality, reliability, cost, vendor dependencies, and delivery speed.