Applied AI Developer

Title: Applied AI DeveloperLocation: Palo Alto, CA. Job SummaryRockwoods is seeking a hands-on Applied AI Developer to join our Enterprise AI team. In this role, you will identify high-impact AI opportunities, architect scalable platforms, and implement advanced development patterns such as LLM orchestration and agentic workflows to enhance organizational efficiency. Key Responsibilities • Evaluate & Validate: Assess agentic vs. traditional solutions and establish rigorous automated evaluation and testing frameworks. • Architect Systems: Design sophisticated agentic architectures involving tool orchestration, reasoning, memory, and human-in-the-loop cycles. • Establish Governance: Implement essential guardrails, audit trails, and ethical AI practices to ensure system reliability and compliance. • Lead Implementation: Execute proofs-of-concept and transition successful pilots into production-grade solutions for engineering teams. • Collaborate: Partner with product, security, and platform units to convert theoretical AI use cases into functional enterprise tools. Candidate Requirements • Experience: 5+ years in software engineering, with 2+ years specifically deploying production-level applied AI. • Technical Stack: Proficiency in Python and/or Go; expertise in scaling multi-agent systems beyond basic LLM prompts. • AI Ecosystems: Mastery of frameworks like LangGraph or Claude Agent SDK, alongside observability tools such as LangSmith or Braintrust. • Backend Fundamentals: Strong grasp of system design, infrastructure failure modes, and cloud-native environments (GCP/AWS). • Data & Security: Experience with enterprise API integration (OAuth2, RBAC) and managing complex SQL/NoSQL data layers. • Leadership: Exceptional communication skills with a proven ability to mentor peers and elevate technical standards. Preferred Qualifications • Experience building custom MCP servers and optimizing inference costs. • Proficiency with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and RAG architectures (vector databases, hybrid search). • Track record of using AI-native coding tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate the development lifecycle.