Senior AI Engineer MSC AI Innovation
Job Location:
Peoria County, IL - USA
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Department:
Job Summary
MSC (Microsoft Specialized Clouds) AI Innovation is an AI-first team that incubates builds and accelerates solutions aligned to Microsoft most critical business priorities within the Sovereign AI space. We specialize in 0 to 1 work - taking ideas from concept to MVP and later into scalable production-ready solutions.
As a Senior AI Engineer in the MSC IL AI Innovation team you will lead the design development and productization of advanced AI solutions for Microsoft Specialized Clouds with a strong focus on sovereign-first secure and responsible AI systems.
You will operate as a technical leader owning endtoend AI architecture and delivery influencing platform direction and mentoring engineers while working closely with architects product managers security and operations teams. This role goes beyond implementation; you will shape how AI is built governed and scaled across sovereign and regulated cloud environments.
Responsibilities
Design and build AI agents that plan use tools/APIs manage state/memory and reliably complete multi-step workflows.
Own AI features from design through production including deployment monitoring and livesite reliability with an eval-first development lifecycle: define success criteria build evaluation datasets and automated harnesses and run human-in-the-loop reviews where needed.
Develop and maintain prompt retrieval and memory strategies (system prompts few-shot examples tool schemas retrieval context) with proper versioning and evaluation coverage.
Debug AI behavior using prompt analysis data inspection and model/tool-call traces and translate failure patterns into targeted improvements.
Establish and track AI quality metrics (e.g. accuracy groundedness relevance hallucination rate) and integrate them into CI/CD release gates.
Optimize runtime performance and economics (token usage inference cost latency caching model selection/routing batching) and implement monitoring and continuous improvement loops (online signals drift detection structured user feedback).
Partner with product design and domain stakeholders to define use cases acceptance criteria and rollout plans for AI features.
Live site responsibility
Qualifications
Required qualifications
You have at least 7 years professional software development with at least 4 years of software engineering experience in the AI space (e.g. building and shipping AI/ML or GenAI features in production)
You have proven experience with building AI agents
Hands-on experience with evaluation methodologies and integrating quality standards/guardrails into delivery.
Proficiency in Python and/or C# with experience using REST APIs and SDKs.
Deep understanding of AI system design including ML fundamentals Generative AI concepts and cloud-native architectures.
Preferred qualifications
Bachelors degree in computer science Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
Strong context engineering and debugging skills across prompts tool schemas retrieval pipelines and model behavior (not only code-level debugging).
Ability to work effectively with non-deterministic/probabilistic systems and design reliability despite variable outputs.
Proficiency in software engineering fundamentals (APIs data structures CI/CD observability) applied to AI systems.
Azure stack: Experience shipping production-grade AI features (LLMs and/or classical ML) on Azure with measurable quality metrics.
Experience with LLM observability/tracing and eval tooling including building internal quality gates and optimizing inference cost/latency in real-time systems.
Experience with retrieval systems (indexing chunking strategies reranking) and grounding techniques.
Ability to govern AI outputs: define quality standards and guardrails apply responsible AI practices and put monitoring/evaluation in place to maintain reliability over time.
Experience in driving innovation and creating new initiatives from the ground up.
Proven ability to work independently own large problem spaces and collaborate across disciplines.
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age ancestry citizenship color family or medical care leave gender identity or expression genetic information immigration status marital status medical condition national origin physical or mental disability political affiliation protected veteran or military status race ethnicity religion sex (including pregnancy) sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process read more about requesting accommodations.
Required Experience:
IC
