Principal Full Stack AI Engineer

Position Summary
Vertex is seeking an AI Full-Stack Engineer to create AI-powered applications and agents across internal and user-facing experiences, owning end-to-end solutions (UX, services, agent orchestration, data access, platform integration, deployment, and production operations).

Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and productionize full-stack AI applications, agents, and multi-step workflows.
- Work with end users, product teams, and stakeholders to solve real workflow problems quickly.
- Build agents that reason across steps, invoke tools, call APIs, retrieve information, and take actions within enterprise guardrails.
- Own end-to-end delivery across UI, services, APIs, data access, orchestration, and integrations.
- Develop reusable agent patterns, components, prompts, tools, and orchestration logic.
- Iterate on agent behavior using usage data, feedback, evaluation results, and operational metrics.
- Improve quality via testing, experimentation, benchmarking, and structured measurement.
- Partner with platform, integration, data, security, and product teams to ensure secure, reliable, maintainable, enterprise-aligned agents.
- Define best practices for agent design, tool use, fallback behavior, escalation, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Support full SDLC: architecture, development, integration, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, optimization.
- Contribute to observability (logging, tracing, performance tracking, issue analysis).
- Design with security, compliance, and responsible AI principles.
- Stay current and translate emerging generative AI/agentic patterns into practical applications.

Required Qualifications
- BS in CS/Software Engineering/AI/Data Science or related; equivalent experience acceptable.
- Experience in full-stack/AI/ML/intelligent application development.
- Hands-on production experience with LLMs, AI workflows, or agentic systems.
- End-to-end delivery across front-end, back-end, APIs, data stores, and enterprise systems.
- Experience using AI-assisted development/autonomous coding agents to design, generate, test, review, debug, optimize, and refactor code across enterprise systems.
- AI-native engineering practices, standards/governance for responsible AI coding assistants.
- Ability to move from prototype to production with speed, quality, and rigor.
- Experience working with users/stakeholders to refine solutions.
- Strong problem-solving/systems thinking.
- Strong written and verbal communication across technical/non-technical teams.

Technical Skills Required
- Full-stack development; LLM app development.
- Agentic workflow design/orchestration; prompt engineering/iteration.
- Tool use and API integration; multi-step workflow automation.
- Rapid prototyping and productionization.
- AI evaluation/testing/quality measurement.
- Logging/monitoring/observability; API/services design and data modeling.
- Distributed systems, secure software development, enterprise integrations.
- Cloud development; version control, CI/CD, deployment practices.

Preferred Skills
- Forward deployed/embedded delivery experience.
- Internal copilots/assistants/task-oriented agent building.
- Orchestration frameworks, runtimes, tool-calling and retrieval patterns.
- Enterprise tool/workflow/document/knowledge repository integrations.
- Evaluation frameworks for quality/groundedness/reliability.
- Human-in-the-loop workflows and safe failure/escalation.
- AI observability/tracing/operational analytics.
- Regulated-industry experience (biotech/pharma/healthcare/life sciences).

Pay Range
- $166,640 - $250,000