AI Engineer – Cloud Software & AI Platforms - Contract - San Jose, California, United States
$118,900 - $172,200 USD yearly
Originally posted 22 August 2026 by the employer. Relisted by the employer on 30 September 2026.
Focus on large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI workflows.
About the role
As an AI Engineer, you will design, develop, and optimize AI-powered applications and intelligent services to improve developer productivity, knowledge discovery, and engineering workflows. This role involves working across machine learning, large language models (LLMs), search technologies, data pipelines, and cloud-native platforms to deliver scalable AI solutions.
What you'll do
- Design and develop AI and machine learning solutions leveraging LLMs, retrieval systems, and agent-based architectures.
- Build and optimize agentic AI workflows that coordinate LLMs, tools, enterprise data sources, APIs, and multi-step reasoning.
- Build and optimize data processing, indexing, and retrieval pipelines for intelligent search and knowledge discovery.
- Develop evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and monitoring solutions to measure system quality and accuracy.
- Experiment with model selection, prompt engineering, retrieval strategies, ranking approaches, and fine-tuning techniques.
- Develop and maintain cloud-native services and APIs supporting AI applications.
What you'll need
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
- 3+ years of industry experience in software engineering, machine learning, data science, or related disciplines.
- Strong programming skills in Python, typescript, and familiarity with modern software development practices.
- Experience working with machine learning, generative AI, large language models, or information retrieval systems.
- Understanding of vector databases, search technologies, embeddings, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) concepts.
- Experience developing scalable services on public cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
- Familiarity with REST APIs, distributed systems, and cloud-native architectures.
Nice to have
- Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks and agentic AI systems.
- Familiarity with Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI, or comparable AI services.
- Experience with evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and A/B testing methodologies.
- Knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.
- Experience with knowledge graphs, semantic search, or recommendation systems.
- Exposure to MLOps, model deployment, and production AI systems.
- Experience working in developer tools, enterprise software, or technical documentation environments.
Skills: AI-powered applications, large language models, cloud-native platforms, data pipelines, agentic AI workflows
This role has been open 54 days — below the 56-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
98
|
Median days open
56 d
|
Median salary
$220k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Altera | All employers we track in this specialty (98 roles · 29 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 98 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 16 | 6127 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 54 d | 56 d (−2 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $220k |
Skills observed across this category: AI-powered applications, large language models, cloud-native platforms, data pipelines, agentic AI workflows
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 21 open roles · median 55 d
- NVIDIA · 19 open roles · median 53 d
- AMD · 7 open roles · median 45 d
- Intel Corporation · 6 open roles · median 30 d
- Micron Technology · 6 open roles · median 39 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 5 open roles · median 44 d
How we counted: 98 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (AI ML Hardware) roles from 29 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.