AI Engineer (Backend + LLM) — Remote Contract

AI Engineer (Backend + LLM) — Remote Contract We're looking for an experienced AI Engineer with strong backend fundamentals to join a client project on a contract basis. This is a hands-on role for someone who's shipped real production AI — not just experiments — and is comfortable owning features end to end. What you'll work on - Building and integrating LLM-powered features into production applications - Designing and developing backend services and APIs (Python) - Building RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and automation systems - Integrating third-party services and AI provider APIs (OpenAI, Claude, etc.) - Working with databases, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure - Improving performance, reliability, and scalability of AI systems in production Required experience - 4+ years of professional backend development, strong in Python (FastAPI, Django, or Flask) - Proven experience building and maintaining production APIs and microservices - Hands-on experience integrating LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, or similar) into real applications — prompting, embeddings, RAG - Solid understanding of backend architecture and system design - Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or Redis - Experience deploying on AWS or similar cloud (Docker, CI/CD) - Strong communication skills and ability to work independently in a remote team Nice to have - Experience with agentic frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, or similar) - Vector databases and embedding pipelines - Experience with real-time systems or voice AI - MLOps / model deployment experience Details - Type: Contract / freelance - Location: Remote (anywhere) - Engagement: [hours per week / duration] - Rate: [competitive, based on experience] To apply, please share: 1. Examples of backend/AI systems you've built (links or brief descriptions) 2. A specific LLM/AI project you shipped to production 3. Your availability and expected rate