Senior AI Agent Engineer

Job Title: Senior AI Agent Engineer

Location: LOCAL TO CHARLOTTE ONLY Hybrid 3 days week in office in Charlotte NC (( LOCAL CANDIDATES ONLY)
Visa: US Citizen or Green Card only

Interview: 2 Virtual Interviews

Rate: $80-90/hr on Lorien W2

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*Must have- AWS Bedrock LLM especially Claude Python/lambdas

Job Description:

Preference would be for hybrid/candidates local to Charlotte. She is open to seeing virtual candidates but local/hybrid candidates will get preference. If a candidate is in Charlotte it is expected that they will be hybrid. Additional candidate needed due to a backfill. There are still some skills assessments scheduled on DUKEJPthat I am going to move over to this posting.

We are one of the largest electric power holding companies in the United States providing electricity to 7.7 million retail customers in six states. We have approximately 51000 megawatts of electric generating capacity in the Carolinas the Midwest and Florida and natural gas distribution services serving more than 1.6 million customers in Ohio Kentucky Tennessee and the Carolinas.
We are transforming our customers experience modernizing our energy grid generating cleaner energy and expanding our natural gas infrastructure to create a smarter energy future for our customers.
As part of the Digital Transformation organization you will be part of a fast-paced entrepreneurial energetic and high performing team helping to design cloud native applications and services to enhance the Customer experience. This group is nimble and creative and will shape our technology roadmap. You will be focused on developing well-designed efficient code that adheres to the latest industry standards and assist in coding testing and debugging new software or making enhancements to existing software for customers. You will be working with designers developers and product owners in a small team setting to integrate software components into fully functional software systems spanning multiple business areas.
The Digital Transformation team is located at the Duke Energy Innovation Center at Optimist Hall with product teams delivering a wide-range of leading edge solutions. Read more about the Innovation Center at Optimist Hall.
An AWS Senior AI Agent Engineer is responsible for designing and implementing highly complex agentic/prompt engineering solutions.

Individuals with this role are required to:
Design and implement agentic AI solutions using AWS Bedrock including Agents Knowledge Bases and Guardrails
Build serverless architectures using AWS Lambda Step Functions and EventBridge to orchestrate AI agent workflows
Design and engineer sophisticated prompts for agentic AI systems that can plan reason and execute multi-step workflows
Develop prompt architectures that enable AI agents to use tools APIs and external resources effectively
Create and refine chain-of-thought tree-of-thought and ReAct (Reasoning Acting) prompting strategies
Build evaluation frameworks to measure agent performance reliability and safety
Collaborate with ML and software engineers to integrate prompt strategies with agent frameworks (LangChain Bedrock AgentCore) and leveraging Bedrock agents/services/foundational models.
Optimize prompts for accuracy efficiency cost and latency in production environments
Implement guardrails and safety measures to ensure responsible agent behavior
Document prompt patterns best practices and design principles for the broader team
Stay current with the latest research in agentic AI prompt engineering and LLM capabilities
Design and build highly complex software solutions (specifically 2 years of experience with AWS serverless development and 4 years of experience on a programing language such as Java or Python)
Program well-designed efficient code independently.
Collaborate with designers developers and product owners to build solutions.
Clearly communicate team wide progress and identify blocking processes/patterns that hold a team back.
Participate in paired programming and code reviews with juniors to expand the teams collective knowledge and understanding of software engineering.
Complete independent research to refine best practices and present work to peers.
Turn complex ideas into manageable pieces of work to complete as part of a product team.
Coach and mentor prompt engineers.
Provide technical guidance to leadership so that solutions are built with innovation and sustainability in mind.
Learn the business drivers of a product and help drive the technical direction of a product to fulfill the desired vision.

Qualifications
3 years of experience in prompt engineering AI/ML or related fields
Deep understanding of large language models (e.g. Claude) and their capabilities
Proven experience designing prompts for autonomous agents and multi-step reasoning tasks
Strong knowledge of agentic frameworks and patterns (ReAct Plan-and-Execute Reflection etc.)
Strong experience with AWS Bedrock (Agents Knowledge Bases Guardrails and foundational models)
Proficiency with AWS serverless services: Lambda Step Functions API Gateway DynamoDB S3
Knowledge of AWS security best practices including IAM KMS and VPC configurations
Familiar with Terraform and HCP
Proficiency in Python and experience with AI agent frameworks (e.g LangChain)
Experience with API integration and tool-use patterns for AI agents