AI Engineer / LLM Developer (Microsoft Foundry)
Long-term contract role with a leading investment management firm.
Hybrid work environment – NJ (3 days/week onsite)
General Skill Profile (in order of preference)
Microsoft Foundry, Python, LLM Development, Azure AI, Prompt Engineering, APIs, Microsoft Fabric (plus), Power BI (plus)
What You Will Do
- Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI applications using the Microsoft Foundry platform.
- Build custom Generative AI solutions leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex business problems.
- Develop AI-powered applications that integrate seamlessly with the Microsoft ecosystem, including Azure services, Microsoft Fabric, and Power Platform where appropriate.
- Build and optimize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions and other enterprise AI architectures.
- Develop Python-based services, APIs, and automation workflows supporting AI applications.
- Evaluate, fine-tune, and optimize LLM performance for accuracy, scalability, and business value.
- Collaborate with business stakeholders to translate business problems into AI-driven solutions.
- Integrate enterprise data sources into AI applications while ensuring security and governance best practices.
- Prototype new AI capabilities and transition successful prototypes into production.
- Document AI architectures, development standards, and implementation best practices.
- Stay current with emerging AI technologies and recommend practical applications for the organization.
What You Will Need
- 4+ years of professional software development experience with advanced Python.
- Hands-on experience building and deploying applications on the Microsoft Foundry platform.
- Demonstrated experience developing production LLM-based applications—not just experimentation or theoretical knowledge.
- Experience with prompt engineering, model evaluation, and LLM optimization techniques.
- Experience integrating AI solutions with enterprise data sources and APIs.
- Strong understanding of AI application architecture and scalable solution design.
- Experience building REST APIs and Python-based backend services.
- Experience working with large and complex datasets.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain AI concepts to technical and business audiences.
- Experience within financial services is highly desirable.
Nice to Have
- Microsoft Fabric experience.
- Azure AI Services / Azure OpenAI.
- Vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
- Semantic search and embeddings.
- Power BI integration.
- Machine Learning experience.
- MLOps or AI deployment pipelines.
- Experience with LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or similar AI frameworks.