NOTE: This is Contract-to-Hire, You start as a full-time contractor (40 hours/week) for 12 months.
At the end of the 12 months, Client intends to convert the role into direct, permanent employment with Client
On conversion to full-time employment: To be located in office locations in India (Pune or Chennai), US (Houston, Minneapolis, or Atlanta), or Europe (Amsterdam - Netherlands or Bari - Italy) is required, as you will work in a hybrid model of 8 days per month in the office.
You must be based in India, Unites States or Europe and legally authorized to work there.
About Andela
Andela exists to connect brilliance and opportunity. Since 2014, we have been dedicated to breaking down global barriers and accelerating the future of work for both technologists and organizations around the world. For technologists, Andela offers competitive long-term career opportunities with leading organizations, access to a global community of professionals, and educational opportunities with leading technology providers.
At Andela, we’re deeply passionate about creating long-lasting and transformative growth opportunities for all - and doing it in an E.P.I.C. way! We’re excited to continue building our remote-first team with incredible people like you. After applying for this role, you will join our Andela Community of brilliant technologists by passing a technical screening and live interview. As a community member, you’ll have access to many exclusive technologist roles. Join Andela today to access this opportunity and more in our global marketplace!
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Overview
Client is seeking a hands-on Lead AI Platform Engineer for the Platform Engineering Team. This role designs and builds production-grade AI and software services and SDKs, accelerates delivery using AI-assisted development (e.g., GitHub Copilot), and partners closely with product and platform teams to ship reliable software fast.
The ideal candidate is an expert Python engineer who pairs effectively with AI tools, has deep experience with Web APIs, SDK design, and cloud platforms (Azure and/or AWS), and brings practical, production-level expertise with LLMs, RAG, and prompt engineering.
Your Skills
- Expert Python Engineer: You build resilient, self-healing, scalable systems and APIs.
- AI-Assisted Pro: You pair-program effectively with AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to "vibe code" while maintaining engineering rigor, code safety, and readability.
- Bias for Action: You can design, develop, test, validate, and deploy production code quickly using the toolchain provided.
- Quality Driven: You write high-quality, well-tested code and automate everything you can (tests, builds, deployments, checks).
- Cloud-Fluent: You are comfortable with Azure and/or AWS, specifically serverless, containers, and managed services.
- Deeply Curious: You experiment thoughtfully and iterate based on data and feedback.
- Strong Communicator: You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and can explain complex tradeoffs concisely.
- Execution-Centric: You own outcomes end-to-end and thrive in an agile, collaborative environment.
Responsibilities
- Architect and implement secure, scalable Web APIs in Python (e.g., FastAPI), including authentication/authorization, rate limiting, and observability.
- Design, develop, test, version, and publish Python SDKs, including semantic versioning, strong documentation, and samples.
- Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, refactoring, test generation, and code reviews while enforcing standards.
- Build, deploy, and operate applications on Azure and/or AWS (e.g., Azure Functions, App Service, AKS; or AWS Lambda, ECS/EKS), using infrastructure-as-code where appropriate.
- Develop AI solutions using LLMs and RAG (e.g., Azure OpenAI Service, Amazon Bedrock, embeddings, vector stores), including prompt design, evaluation, and guardrails.
- Implement robust testing and validation (unit, integration, contract, and load tests) and ensure high code coverage and quality gates.
- Instrument services with logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards; proactively identify and remediate bottlenecks and defects.
- Collaborate with product, data, security, and platform teams to define requirements, ship features, and meet SLAs/SLOs.
- Mentor developers on Python best practices, AI-assisted development, performance, security, and operational excellence.
Experience & Skills Required
- 7+ years of professional software development experience, of which 5+ years are hands-on Python in production environments.
- 4+ years building and operating Web APIs at scale (FastAPI, Django, or Flask), including OpenAPI/Swagger and contract-first design.
- 3+ years deploying to cloud platforms (Azure and/or AWS) using services such as Azure Functions/App Service/AKS or AWS Lambda/ECS/EKS, and infrastructure-as-code (Bicep/ARM/Terraform). Azure is strongly preferred.
- 2+ years of hands-on Generative AI experience in production or pre-production, including prompt engineering, LLM integration, RAG pipelines, and model/response evaluation.
- Demonstrated daily use of AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate delivery, with the ability to describe concrete productivity gains and the guardrails applied.
- 3+ years designing, versioning, and distributing SDKs (packaging, semantic versioning, PyPI or an internal package registry).
- 3+ years with CI/CD (Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions), automated testing (pytest), and quality tooling (ruff/black/mypy).
- Solid understanding of security and compliance (OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, secrets management).
- Observability experience with centralized logging and tracing (OpenTelemetry, Azure Monitor, CloudWatch).
- 4+ years of data layer experience across SQL and NoSQL, plus hands-on work with vector databases (e.g., Azure AI Search, OpenSearch, Pinecone).
- Technical leadership at Lead level: you set technical direction for a feature area or service, review others' code, and raise the engineering bar — without formal people-management responsibility.
Nice to Have
- Experience in a regulated or enterprise B2B information services domain (legal, tax, healthcare, finance, compliance).
- Agentic AI / multi-agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel) and MCP-based tool integration.
- Containerization and orchestration at scale (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS).
- Exposure to LLM evaluation and observability tooling (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge, tracing for prompt pipelines).
Soft Skills
- Fluent professional English, written and verbal, with senior stakeholders.
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity and shifting priorities in a fast-moving AI environment.
- Collaborative, low-ego, and pragmatic about trade-offs between speed and long-term maintainability.
At Andela, we know our strengths lie in our diverse community whose talents, perspectives, backgrounds, and orientations we take pride in. Andela is committed to nurturing a work environment where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. Everyone has the right to work in a professional atmosphere that promotes equal employment opportunities and prohibits discriminatory practices. Andela provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to factors including but not limited to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, pregnancy (including breastfeeding), genetic information, HIV/AIDS or any other medical status, family or parental status, marital status, amnesty or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. This commitment applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including but not limited to hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. Our policies expressly prohibit any form of harassment and/or discrimination, as stated above
