Senior Engineer - AI Systems

Build AI systems for problems that matter. 8th Element is an AI-first services company focused on turning AI into measurable business outcomes. A significant part of our work is in healthcare, where we build systems for problems such as prior authorization, payment integrity, clinical intelligence and complex operational workflows.We’re looking for an engineer who wants to work beyond conventional application development — building systems where AI, software and real business processes come together.

What You’ll Work On

• AI agents and multi-step workflows
• LLM-powered applications and decision systems
• Retrieval and knowledge systems over large document collections
• AI evaluation and feedback systems
• Backend services, APIs and enterprise integrations
• Distributed workflows, observability and production infrastructure
• Reusable engineering capabilities across projects

You’ll work across problem → architecture → implementation → production .The problems aren’t always well-defined. An agent may behave unexpectedly. A retrieval system may perform well in testing but fail in practice. A model improvement may increase quality but make the system too expensive.You’ll need to understand what is actually happening and figure out what to do about it.

What We’re Looking For Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems.You will likely be strong in:

• Python
• Backend/API development
• PostgreSQL or relational databases
• Async / distributed systems
• Docker and cloud
• Testing and CI/CD

Experience with LLMs, agents, RAG, vector databases, evaluation or observability is valuable.We don’t expect a particular technology checklist. **Depth of engineering and ability to learn matter more.

Years of experience required: 3-8 years** How We Work We’re a small team. You’ll work directly with engineers, product people, domain experts and clients.Engineers are involved in understanding the problem and shaping the solution, not just implementing a finished specification.We use AI extensively in our own engineering workflow. You should be comfortable using AI tools while still understanding, evaluating and owning what you ship.

Skills: async programming,api development,postgresql,backend development,rag,llm,python,rest api,production system development