Gatesfoundation

Gatesfoundation

Senior AI Engineer (*3-Year LTE)

Seattle, WA · Senior · Contract

No sponsorship$186k-$289kDetected 30 days ago
PythonBackend DevelopmentGitDatabricksVector DatabasesAWSGCPAzureCloud PlatformsDockerCI/CDDevOpsMachine LearningPyTorchData EngineeringLLMsRAGAgentic AIMLOpsAccessibility5G/LTEPublic HealthResearchMentoring

About the role

  • You will work on projects with real-world impact for global public good, integrated into a collaborative, mission-driven team alongside IDM researchers and their internal and external collaborators.
  • You will be essential in turning AI ideas into working systems agents, services, evaluations, and the connective tissue that lets a small team ship a lot.
  • This is a 36-month limited-term position based in Seattle, WA.

Responsibilities

  • Design and build agentic AI systems - multi-step workflows, tool use, and autonomous task orchestration using modern LLM frameworks - and ship them as reliable backend services.
  • Build and operate retrieval systems: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, and knowledge-graph-backed retrieval where it earns its keep.
  • Design AI evaluation pipelines and benchmarks so the team can tell whether an agent, model, or retrieval system is actually getting better - and monitor them in production.
  • Architect, implement, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that other engineers, researchers, and applications build on top of.
  • Develop data pipelines and workflows leveraging Azure (Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure Databricks) and Hugging Face.
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, tool use, and prompt engineering at production scale.
  • We are looking for a senior generalist engineer who is energized by designing and building modern AI systems agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and the backend services that hold them together.
  • You are passionate about well-architected software, you make pragmatic build-vs-buy and self-host-vs-API calls, and you reach for the simplest approach that actually solves the problem.
  • Experience building AI evaluations and observability - measuring quality, cost, and latency of LLM systems and acting on the results.

Requirements

  • Proficiency in Python, including for AI work (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face, or similar).
  • Strong general-purpose backend engineering: you can pick up unfamiliar code, debug across systems, and ship services that hold up in use.

Nice to have

  • Bachelor's degree in a technical field with 5+ years building production software, or equivalent experience.
  • Advanced degree is a plus, not required.

Compensation

  • The salary range for this role is $186,400 to $288,800 USD.

Benefits

  • The IDM team is composed of research scientists and software developers who develop and prototype computational tools to advise on global health and development policy and identify and address critical knowledge gaps.
  • Collaborate directly with researchers, analysts, and program staff to translate fuzzy domain problems into shippable systems for global health and global development.

Company info

  • The Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) is an embedded research institute with the Gates Foundation.
  • We develop, use, and share computational modeling tools, and promote quantitative decision-making to support global efforts to eradicate infectious diseases and achieve permanent improvements in the health of those most in need.
  • IDM is a multifaceted organization with a work environment defined by innovation and teamwork.
  • As part of our work, we routinely collaborate with groups at the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, the Centers for Disease Control, PATH, ministries of health, as well as universities and research institutes across the globe.
  • The Foundation
  • We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world.

Visa & Work Authorization

  • Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located.
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