Senior AI Engineer

POSITION SUMMARY:

We are seeking an Sr AI Engineer to join our Information Technology team at our corporate office in Springfield, MO. 
 
The Sr AI Engineer serves as a senior technical leader responsible for architecting, scaling, and governing enterprise AI platforms and solutions aligned with the enterprise AI roadmap. This role leads the design and operationalization of advanced AI systems, including generative AI, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent automation capabilities that drive measurable business impact across the enterprise. 
 
This position provides technical leadership across AI engineering initiatives, establishes enterprise AI standards and best practices, mentors engineering teams, and partners closely with business, data, security, and platform leaders to ensure scalable, secure, and production-ready AI ecosystems. 
 
This position requires working onsite in our Springfield, MO headquarters. 

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:  

• Lead enterprise AI architecture decisions, reference patterns, and platform strategies across multiple business domains. 
• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify AI-driven automation and insight opportunities and define success metrics/acceptance criteria. 
• Translate business needs into technical requirements and design end-to-end AI workflows, including data sourcing, orchestration, and integration points. 
• Ensure data readiness by assessing availability and quality across enterprise and third-party sources; partner with Data Engineering to design and validate pipelines that produce high-quality, AI-ready datasets with data contracts, lineage, and schema-drift detection. 
• Perform data preparation and transformation in SQL or Python when needed for AI workflows. 
• Conduct data quality assessments, establish validation rules, maintain data lineage and data contracts, and implement schema-drift detection with automated gates. 
• Design, develop, and deploy LLM-based, RAG, agentic AI, and generative AI solutions using modern ML/LLM frameworks and cloud AI services. 
• Contribute to and implement enterprise PromptOps and LLMOps practices including evaluation pipelines, prompt governance, structured outputs, guardrails, rollback strategies, and automated testing. 
• Build and operate autonomous and semi-autonomous AI workflows with auditable actions, human-in-the-loop approvals, feature flags, and operational safeguards. 
• Implement model lifecycle management with experiment tracking, model registry, retraining, embedding/vector-index versioning, rollback, and monitoring. 
• Lead evaluation and selection of foundation models, embedding strategies, vector retrieval architectures, and inference optimization techniques. 
• Integrate AI solutions via APIs and event-driven architectures using versioned, backward-compatible contracts with semantic versioning and deprecation policies. 
• Apply MLOps and LLMOps best practices for scalable, observable, and secure deployments including containerization, orchestration, CI/CD, and model lifecycle management. 
• Implement automated testing including unit, integration, regression, evaluation, and contract testing for AI systems and services. 
• Partner with Data Scientists and engineering teams to productionize AI and ML solutions into scalable enterprise systems. 
• Provide technical mentorship and code/design reviews for AI Engineers, Data Engineers, and software development teams. 
• Ensure responsible AI governance including RBAC/IAM, secrets management, PII minimization/redaction, audit logging, explainability, and compliance with governance and privacy standards. 
• Lead implementation of observability frameworks including tracing, telemetry, hallucination detection, token/cost monitoring, dashboards, and alerting. 
• Establish service-level objectives (SLOs), operational standards, reliability metrics, and incident response processes for AI platforms. 
• Research and evaluate emerging AI technologies such as multimodal models, vector databases, agentic AI, and AI infrastructure platforms. 
• Contribute to AI standards, reusable frameworks, engineering documentation, and enterprise best practices. 
• Participate in on-call rotation and operational support activities as needed. 
• ALL OTHER DUTIES AS ASSIGNED 

EXPERIENCE/QUALIFICATIONS:

• Minimum Degree Required:    Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent ex