AI Software Engineer III (Michigan)
Summary
Contract AI software engineer (placed by staffing firm SGA with a banking client, hybrid) who designs and delivers backend guardrail, enforcement, and validation services and APIs governing how AI agentic systems behave across services. Core stack: Python, TypeScript, AWS (Lambda, Fargate, API Gateway), Terraform, with LLM/agent safety work.
- Design and deliver backend services and APIs that enforce system behavior across multiple services
- Define where and how enforcement, filtering, and validation should occur within system architectures
- Build cross-service controls and establish the patterns other engineers implement against
- Instrument and improve observability across service boundaries — structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing
- Own shared tooling and platform components with broad organizational reach
- Mentor engineers on safe design, defensive programming, and failure handling practices
- Writes production-quality code with strong proficiency in Python and TypeScript
- Demonstrates advanced experience working in cloud environments (AWS)
- Demonstrates advanced experience working with Infrastructure as code tools in production environments
- Designs and implements scalable backend services and APIs across service boundaries
- Defines enforcement patterns and interface contracts consumed by other teams
- Thinks in systems — reasons about cross-service dependencies, failure propagation, and contract stability
- Communicates defensive design principles clearly to other engineers
- Shows strong technical curiosity and forms clear, experience-backed opinions
- What Differentiates This Role
- This role is focused on how systems behave under misuse, failure, or unexpected inputs — not on building user-facing features. At this level, you are defining where enforcement lives and how it works across services, not just implementing within one. You bring both the technical depth to build these systems and the communication skills to make the patterns repeatable by others.
- 5-8 years of software engineering experience with strong proficiency in Python and TypeScript
- Demonstrated experience delivering production systems on AWS (Lambda, Fargate, API Gateway)
- Demonstrated experience building production systems on AWS using Terraform
- Experience designing enforcement, filtering, or validation logic that spans multiple services
- Track record of defining interfaces, contracts, or patterns adopted by other engineers
- Ability to mentor junior and mid-level engineers on defensive design and safe coding practices
- Clear written and verbal communication — able to define and document system-level enforcement patterns
- Experience designing and building agentic workflows or multi-agent systems
- Familiarity with LLM integration patterns — prompt injection detection, guardrail design, or output filtering
- Experience with AWS Bedrock — model invocation, guardrail configuration, or AgentCore runtimes
- Experience with agentic or multi-step workflow systems or Background in platform engineering or developer tooling roles