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AI / LLM Engineer

Location Remote (Global) Type Full-time Experience 4+ years Team Engineering Openings 2 positions

About the role

A demo is easy. Reliability is the real work, and it’s the part you’ll own. You’ll build the AI layer of real products: the prompts, pipelines, agents and evaluations that hold up when actual users hit them, not just in a clean walkthrough. The gap between “it worked once” and “it works every time” is where this job lives.

Because Externo is a service-based consulting company, you won’t polish one product forever. You’ll ship AI features across many clients and industries, from a support copilot one quarter to a document-heavy RAG system the next. You own the AI layer end to end: framing what’s actually possible with a model, building it, measuring it honestly, and making the call on what’s good enough to ship. No layers of approval to engineer around here.

What you’ll do

  • Design and ship LLM-powered features end to end, from first prototype to production.
  • Build agent workflows and tool-use pipelines that stay reliable under messy, real-world input.
  • Design RAG systems (retrieval, chunking, embeddings and context) that actually return the right answer.
  • Create evaluation harnesses so quality is a number you can track, not a vibe you argue about.
  • Tune for latency, cost and reliability so features hold up at scale without burning the budget.
  • Keep up with a fast-moving model landscape and bring the best of it back into client work.

Skills & tools

The toolkit you’ll reach for most. You don’t need every one on day one, but you should be fluent across the core.

Core skills
  • LLM app development
  • Prompt engineering
  • RAG
  • Agents & tool-use
  • Evaluation harnesses
  • Python
  • API design
  • Latency & cost tuning
Tools
  • Python
  • OpenAI / Anthropic APIs
  • LangChain / LlamaIndex
  • Vector DBs (pgvector / Pinecone)
  • FastAPI
  • Docker
  • Git
  • Eval frameworks

What we’re looking for

  • 4+ years in software engineering, with real production systems behind you.
  • Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, not just calling them once for a demo.
  • Strong Python and clean API design skills.
  • A rigorous, evaluation-driven mindset: you measure quality instead of guessing at it.
  • You can reason about reliability, latency and cost, and make the trade-offs out loud.
  • You stay calm switching between industries, briefs and clients.

Nice to have

  • Deep experience with RAG and vector databases in production.
  • Familiarity with agent frameworks and orchestration.
  • An ML or data engineering background.
  • Open-source work or side projects we can actually poke at.

Show us your work

A portfolio isn’t required, but real proof helps. If you have a GitHub, shipped LLM features or demos, drop the link in the Resume or portfolio link field on the right. We actually read them.

Is this you?

We hire for a specific kind of mind: people who think differently, work out of the box, and would rather try the less obvious idea than the safe one. We stay small and senior on purpose, so everyone here carries real weight.

Please only apply if you genuinely see yourself in this: a curious, self-driven engineer whose work and values line up with ours. If that’s you, we’d love to meet you. If it isn’t, applying will only waste your time and ours, and we’d rather be honest about that up front.

About Externo

Externo is a service-based consulting company. Businesses bring us in as their outside team to design, build and ship digital and AI products that hold up in the real world, across strategy, UX, LLM features, agent workflows, data pipelines and web experiences. We’re senior, remote-first, and work embedded alongside our clients. Get to know us on our About page, see the services we offer, or read the Externo blog.