Generative AI Application Engineer - 100% Remote

About the Company

Purple Squirrel Enterprises provides HR and recruiting solutions to startups and established global companies, supporting their growth and expansion. For this search, the firm is working exclusively with a well-established SaaS analytics company serving banks and credit unions. The client’s platform helps financial institutions use operational and customer data to make informed business decisions and advance their data analytics capabilities.

The client’s internal AI and Modeling team develops advanced analytics solutions and is expanding its work on generative AI features for the company’s production platform.

About the Role

The client is seeking a Generative AI Application Engineer to design, develop, deploy, and maintain production-ready generative AI applications. This is a hands-on, mid-level software engineering position focused on building applications directly with large language model (LLM) APIs, developing supporting services and data layers, and ensuring deployed features perform reliably in production.

The role is suited to an engineer with strong Python and API development experience, substantial SQL skills, and a proven record of delivering generative AI applications beyond the prototype stage. You will work closely with product management, data engineering, and the AI/Modeling team to turn requirements into working features, maintain evaluation and monitoring processes, and identify opportunities to improve internal efficiency through AI, models, and heuristics.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy production generative AI features using LLM APIs, including prompt design, structured outputs, tool and function calling, retrieval, context management, and failure handling.
• Build and maintain evaluation and regression testing frameworks to assess application behavior as models, prompts, and data change.
• Integrate generative AI components with existing product services, APIs, and data models.
• Work with models hosted on Hugging Face and internally hosted inference engines, including serving-layer configuration and deployment.
• Design, build, and maintain API-based applications and services in line with software development and product lifecycle processes.
• Write and optimize SQL queries for application state, feature data, evaluation datasets, and product analytics.
• Deploy and operate application components across cloud infrastructure, including virtual machines, containers, object storage, and relational database services, primarily on Microsoft Azure.
• Contribute to analytics product development outside AI and modeling when required.
• Support model-based analytics initiatives, including customer segmentation, churn forecasting, and lifetime value forecasting, alongside senior AI/Modeling team members.
• Collaborate with product management, data engineering, and AI/Modeling colleagues to translate requirements into delivered features.
• Participate in code reviews, communicate technical trade-offs and blockers, and keep stakeholders informed of progress.
• Write automated tests, including evaluations for generative AI applications and model-evaluation tests for machine learning components.
• Monitor production applications for accuracy, latency, token consumption, and cost, and participate in production support as needed.
• Follow security, data-handling, and change-management practices appropriate for sensitive financial data.

Required Qualifications

• At least five years of professional software development experience, ideally in a software product organization, including hands-on development of API-based applications and services used in production.
• At least four years of hands-on Python development experience, with the ability to explain and defend technical design decisions.
• At least two years of substantive generative AI development at the LLM API level, including prompt design, structured outputs, tool or function calling, retrieval, and evaluation. No-code or low-code tool assembly alone does not meet this requirement.
• At least two non-trivial generative AI applications built with your direct contribution and running in production. Candidates must be able to explain the business problem, architecture, personal contribution, and evaluation and monitoring approach.
• Strong SQL skills, including joins, aggregations, window functions, and common table expressions (CTEs), along with a working understanding of relational database performance and role-based access controls.
• At least four years of experience working across multiple resource types in a hyperscaler environment, such as virtual machines, containers, object storage, and relational database services. Microsoft Azure is preferred; equivalent AWS or GCP experience is considered.
• Proficiency with version control practices and tools such as Git and/or Azure DevOps.
• Reachable professional references who can verify the experience described in the application, including production generative AI work.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience selecting and evaluating Hugging Face models, including serving formats and quantization choices.
• Direct experience deploying models for self-hosted LLM inference using technologies such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, TGI, Ray Serve, Triton, Ollama, llama.cpp, LightLLM, or similar platforms. Experience with gateway and routing layers such as LiteLLM is also relevant.
• Experience operating self-hosted inference for production applications, including capacity planning, batching and concurrency, versioning, and monitoring.
• Experience building applications or user interfaces that connect to self-hosted, open-source LLMs through APIs.
• Experience with Amazon Bedrock or Microsoft Foundry, formerly Azure AI Foundry.
• Machine learning experience, including feature engineering and model training or evaluation with Pandas, scikit-learn, or similar tools.
• Experience with Python charting libraries such as Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly.
• Experience with Azure SQL, PySpark, or large datasets.
• Additional development experience in C#, Java, or Scala.
• React and TypeScript UI development experience; familiarity with AI Elements or shadcn/ui is a plus.
• Exposure to banking, financial services, or other regulated data environments.

Reference Requirements

• Professional references must be available to verify the experience claimed in the application.
• At least one reference is required from each organization where the candidate’s production generative AI applications were built and deployed.
• References must be able to speak directly to the candidate’s personal contributions, technical decisions, and the application’s production performance.
• References will be contacted, and an offer is contingent on verification of the production generative AI experience described.
• Candidates whose former employers have policies or NDAs that limit reference disclosures should raise the issue during the first interview so an acceptable alternative can be discussed.

Location and Work Arrangement

This is a full-time, W-2 position based in the United States, with remote work available. Candidates must be able to work on East Coast time. The workday begins at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Pacific Time candidates may start at 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time, corresponding to 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, but must be available for meetings at 8:30 a.m. Eastern when needed.

Salary and Benefits

The base salary range is $135,000–$150,000. Candidates who clearly exceed the core requirements, including verified production generative AI experience and strong references, may be considered outside this range.

• The benefits package includes a $1,100 monthly company contribution toward eligible pre-tax benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and HSA options. Additional benefits include:
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, with HSA-compatible plan options.
• UHC Rewards, with the opportunity to earn up to $300 annually without an HSA or $1,000 with an HSA through wellness activities.
• Employer-paid life and AD&D insurance equal to one times salary, up to $200,000.
• Employer-paid short-term and long-term disability coverage.
• Optional additional life and AD&D, critical illness, accident, and hospital indemnity coverage.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
• A 401(k) plan with an employer match of up to 4.5% when employees contribute 6% of salary; the match is immediately vested.
• Company holidays and a Flexible Time Off policy without a fixed PTO cap, coordinated with the employee’s manager.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The client is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. Applicants from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are welcome.