Principal AI Engineer - LLM/Agents

Title: Senior AI Engineer – LLM / Agents

Basic Function:

Senior AI Engineer – LLM / Agents will serve as the technical principal for how SB Energy designs, measures, observes, and scales AI-enabled workflows. This role defines how ChatGPT, Codex, custom agents, MCP servers, skills, tools, APIs, structured responses, token and context management, traces, evals, and production observability work together in governed enterprise workflows.

This person will establish reusable architecture, standards, templates, and quality gates so agentic workflows can move from prototype to controlled production use. The role will help SB Energy make workflows measurable, observable, secure, cost-aware, reliable, and auditable across Power Markets, Storage Optimization, Asset Operations, Project Development, Engineering, Finance, HR, and other approved enterprise domains. The AI Engineer owns the cross-domain operating method, evaluation system, observability patterns, and reusable technical standards that allow those workflows to scale with quality.

Responsibilities:

- Define the technical architecture for SB Energy agent workflows, including ChatGPT, ROCstar, MCP, agents, skills, tools, APIs, retrieval, structured outputs, trace metadata, evals, and observability.

- Establish reusable workflow patterns for agent planning, tool calling, data retrieval, exception handling, fallback behavior, escalation, and production support.

- Create standards for skill design, prompt structure, tool descriptions, tool schemas, API response formats, source citation behavior, structured outputs, and workflow handoffs.

- Define token and context management practices, including when to use conversation state, retrieval, file search, cached context, summarization, structured intermediate state, and compressed tool returns.

- Build evaluation frameworks for agent workflows, including gold datasets, regression tests, numerical reconciliation checks, rubric-based grading, tool-call correctness checks, and human feedback loops.

- Lead the design of observability for agents and tools, including workflow logs, cost, latency, token usage, tool success rate, bad-answer rate, eval pass rate, user acceptance, and incident tracking.

- Partner with domain Forward Deployed Engineers to convert high-value workflows into measurable agent systems with explicit inputs, outputs, owners, permissions, evals, runbooks, release gates, and continuous improvement loops.

- Partner with the Enterprise Systems and Agent Platform role on MCP servers, connector reliability, RBAC, secrets, audit logging, deployment patterns, API governance, and production platform readiness.

- Review agent workflow designs before production release and define go/no-go criteria for quality, safety, reliability, cost, latency, security, and operational support.

- Create reusable templates for agent specifications, skill specifications, eval protocols, workflow scorecards, incident reviews, production readiness checklists, and workflow-level success metrics.

- Mentor FDEs, analysts, engineers, and implementation partners on eval-driven development, tool-based workflow design, observable agent operations, and production-quality AI systems.

- Identify recurring failure modes across agents and tools and turn them into tests, standards, instrumentation, documentation, and platform improvements.

Qualifications/Requirements:

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, Information Systems, or a related technical field required.

- Master's degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, Data Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field preferred.

- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data science, machine learning systems, enterprise AI, platform engineering, or decision systems, with demonstrated technical leadership across complex production workflows.

- Experience designing, building, or governing agentic AI systems, LLM applications, tool-calling workflows, evaluation systems, observability systems, or production AI platforms.

- Strong understanding of modern LLM workflow design, including prompts, skills, tools, retrieval, structured outputs, APIs, orchestration, context management, token economics, and human-in-the-loop controls.

- Strong engineering judgment around production readiness, failure modes, logging, testing, monitoring, cost, latency, security, permissions, and operational support.

- Experience building eval datasets, regression tests, model or agent scorecards, acceptance criteria, telemetry dashboards, release gates, and production quality standards.

- Experience with Python, APIs, data pipelines, cloud platforms, CI/CD, logging and monitoring systems, analytics workflows, and enterprise integrations.

- Experience with OpenAI, ChatGPT Enterprise, Responses API-style workflows, MCP, Azure, Databricks, SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Monday.com, or enterprise connectors preferred.

- Ability to translate ambiguous business workflows into practical system designs, measurable success criteria, and reusable implementation patterns.

- Ability to work across domain FDEs, engineers, analysts, business leaders, IT, security, legal, compliance, and external implementation partners.

- Energy, renewable infrastructure, power markets, asset operations, storage optimization, project development, or data center experience is a plus.

Location:

Houston, TX, San Francisco Bay Area, CA, Denver, CO, or remote option available. The position may require up to 10% domestic travel.

Base Pay - $160000-$190000

The pay range mentioned above is a guideline. We tailor each offer based on your unique skills, experience, location, and market benchmarks—while ensuring internal parity across our teams. The compensation range provided reflects base pay. Total rewards may also include performance-based bonuses, equity grants, and a market leading comprehensive health and wellness benefits package. Final details will be discussed during the later stages of the hiring process.

Our Health & Wellness Benefits

At SB Energy, we invest in our people and their families with benefits designed for flexibility, support, and peace of mind. Full-time employees enjoy:

• 100% Company-Paid Medical, Dental & Vision (for employees and dependents)
• 401(k) with Company Match
• Generous Paid Time Off + 11 Paid Holidays
• 12 Weeks Paid Parental Leave
• Life, AD&D & Long-Term Disability Coverage
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) for Medical, Dependent Care, Transit & Parking (with company contributions)
• Mental, Physical & Social Wellness Support (with company contributions)
• Flexible Work Arrangements & Hybrid Office Setup Benefits
• Monthly Reimbursement for Phone, Internet & Data
• Optional Legal & Pet Insurance Plans
• Device Purchase Support

At SB Energy, the success of our projects is driven by a desire to see our projects benefit as many people as possible. We work to serve local communities through volunteering, fundraising, and much more. For example, we’re proud to support access and opportunity in engineering and clean energy through impactful mentorship programs and workforce training. When you join SB Energy, you can become a part of these efforts, collaborating with team members who share a vision of building a better future now!

SB Energy is built on a foundation of collaboration and inclusion. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

To learn more about us, visit www.sbenergy.com.

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