Senior Applied AI Engineer

Senior Applied AI Engineer

Contract: 18 Weeks

Pay Rate: $120–$132 per hour

Location: Hybrid — San Diego, CA 92130

Position Overview

We are seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to design, build, and deploy innovative AI solutions that transform business workflows across the enterprise.

This role focuses on developing agentic AI solutions, AI applications, copilots, RAG systems, document intelligence solutions, predictive models, and decision-support tools using approved technologies and governed enterprise data. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering expertise with hands-on experience in modern AI and can take solutions from early-stage prototypes through reliable production deployment.

You will collaborate closely with business stakeholders, Product Owners, Data Engineering, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and AI Governance teams to deliver secure, scalable, and production-ready AI solutions within a regulated life-sciences environment.

The role also offers opportunities to provide technical direction, coordinate cross-functional initiatives, and establish engineering practices that accelerate the responsible adoption of AI.

Key Responsibilities

Solution Design & Delivery

• Design, develop, and deploy agentic AI solutions, copilots, RAG applications, document intelligence systems, predictive models, and decision-support tools.
• Build end-to-end AI pipelines integrating approved models, governed enterprise data, APIs, tools, and workflow orchestration frameworks.
• Partner with business and technical stakeholders to define requirements, success metrics, acceptance criteria, and production-ready solutions.
• Translate business challenges into practical, scalable, and measurable AI solutions.

Engineering & AI Development Practices

• Apply strong software engineering, MLOps, and LLMOps practices across testing, deployment, monitoring, versioning, reliability, and cost management.
• Develop modular, reusable components and engineering patterns that improve delivery speed and solution consistency.
• Create reusable prompts, evaluation assets, technical standards, and engineering guardrails.
• Build solutions that are maintainable, observable, reliable, and designed for production environments.

Technical Leadership

• Lead defined technical workstreams and facilitate key design and architecture decisions.
• Evaluate and communicate technical options, risks, dependencies, constraints, and tradeoffs.
• Coordinate technical delivery across internal teams and external partners.
• Provide code reviews, design feedback, troubleshooting support, and informal technical mentorship.
• Help establish effective engineering practices for the development and deployment of enterprise AI solutions.

Governance, Security & Documentation

• Implement appropriate security, privacy, responsible AI, data classification, access control, traceability, and human-approval safeguards.
• Ensure AI solutions align with enterprise governance and regulatory requirements.
• Document solution architecture, data and model usage, evaluations, limitations, controls, and operational procedures.
• Build solutions that are secure, trustworthy, compliant, supportable, and appropriate for regulated environments.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering, applied AI, or a related field, including experience delivering production solutions.
• Strong Python and software engineering skills, including modular design, testing, source control, CI/CD, APIs, and code review.
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, agent or workflow orchestration, tool integration, RAG, and enterprise data sources.
• Experience deploying and supporting secure AI solutions in Azure, AWS, or GCP production environments.
• Demonstrated ability to guide technical workstreams, evaluate design tradeoffs, mentor peers, and communicate effectively with both business and technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building production-grade agentic AI solutions, including tool calling, state or memory management, workflow execution, evaluation, and human approvals.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or comparable AI platforms and frameworks.
• Experience with vector search and MLOps or LLMOps platforms.
• Experience working in regulated, security-sensitive, or data-sensitive environments.
• Proven ability to coordinate technical delivery across multiple teams or external partners.
• Experience establishing reusable engineering standards, patterns, and practices for enterprise AI development.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means delivering AI solutions that create measurable business value while maintaining high standards for security, reliability, governance, and responsible AI.

The successful engineer will:

• Deliver AI solutions that demonstrate measurable business impact and sustained user adoption.
• Build solutions that are secure, trusted, compliant, reliable, supportable, and cost-conscious.
• Establish reusable AI engineering patterns that accelerate future development while maintaining appropriate governance.
• Provide clear technical direction and effective coordination when leading selected initiatives.
• Help advance the organization's ability to safely and effectively deploy AI into real-world business workflows.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT:

Suna Solutions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

Applicants, with criminal histories, are considered in a manner that is consistent with local, state, and federal laws.

REQUESTING AN ACCOMODATION

Suna Solutions is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for persons with disabilities or religious observances, including reasonable accommodation when needed. If you are hired by Suna Solutions and require accommodation to perform the essential functions of your role, you will be asked to participate in our reasonable accommodation process. Accommodations made to facilitate the recruiting process are not a guarantee of future or continued accommodations once hired.

If you would like to be considered for employment opportunities with Suna Solutions and have accommodation needs for a disability or religious observance, please call us at 1 (888) 223-4788, send us an email or speak with your recruiter.

PAY TRANSPARENCY POLICY STATEMENT

Compensation for roles at Suna Solutions varies depending on a wide array of factors including but not limited to the specific client, office or remote location, role, skill set and level of experience. As required by local law, Suna Solutions provides a reasonable pay scale to include the hourly or salary range that Suna Solutions reasonably expects to pay for roles that may be hired in California, Colorado, New York City or Washington as set forth below.