Senior AI Engineer (Remote)

About the role

Howden, a global insurance group, is hiring a Senior AI Engineer for its US AI Engineering team, working remotely. The role reports to the AI Lead and is full-time and exempt. It is a hands-on software engineering position: writing agents, pipelines, integrations and infrastructure-as-code that brings AI capability into production on Azure. Most of the time is spent in code, in Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, with a strong emphasis on agent-assisted development.

Key responsibilities

• Build production AI agents and conversational solutions on Azure using Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Foundry, Azure Bot Framework and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Implement multi-agent orchestration, tool and function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, and context and memory management in code.
• Build retrieval pipelines and knowledge bases with Azure AI Search and vector stores, including chunking, embeddings and document processing.
• Write evaluation harnesses and regression tests, golden datasets and scoring scripts that run in CI.
• Develop RESTful and event-driven APIs exposing AI capability, using Azure Functions, Container Apps, API Management and Service Bus.
• Refactor prototypes into production code with error handling, retries, rate limiting and cost controls.
• Maintain the knowledge layer: source profiling, extraction, cleansing, normalization and enrichment of structured and unstructured data.
• Model the domain with taxonomies, ontologies, entity and relationship models and metadata schemas for insurance data such as clients, policies, carriers, submissions and claims.
• Tune retrieval quality: chunking, embedding choice, hybrid and semantic search, metadata filtering, reranking and groundedness evaluation.
• Build ingestion and refresh pipelines with lineage, versioning and change detection, and use system and usage data to improve AI performance.
• Use coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) daily for implementation, refactoring, test generation and debugging, and share working patterns with the team.
• Automate repetitive work with scripted agents and write SQL and analysis to answer your own data questions.
• Write and maintain Terraform for Azure AI workloads, including modules, state management, secrets handling and drift detection.
• Own CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, covering plan and apply gates, automated testing, container builds, environment promotion and rollback.