Staff AI Engineer

Our Company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. That's why we build the most complete cloud analytics and data platform for AI. By delivering harmonized data, trusted AI, and faster innovation, we empower the world's leading enterprises to make confident, data‑driven decisions at scale.

The Role

We're looking for a Staff AI Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of production-grade AI agent systems. You will set technical direction, define engineering standards, and work hands-on across agent design, evaluation, and platform infrastructure while mentoring senior engineers and influencing the broader product roadmap.

What You'll Do

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own end-to-end architecture for AI agent capabilities: agentic workflows, MCP integrations, governance and guardrails, evaluation platforms, and autonomous agent patterns.
• Set technical standards for agent orchestration, tool integration, observability, security, and operational excellence — and drive consistency across engineering teams.
• Act as the technical escalation point for complex system design, performance, and reliability challenges.
  
  

AI Systems & Platform Development

• Design and implement production-grade AI systems using LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and agent-based architectures including secure, reusable APIs and platform services.
• Build governance and observability capabilities: guardrails, explainability, suppression controls, cost monitoring, token tracking, and transparency into agent reasoning and tool execution.
• Define standards for MCP server integrations, tool discovery, authentication, and secure agent-tool interactions.
  
  

Quality & Operational Excellence

• Build and evolve evaluation frameworks, golden datasets, and benchmarking methodologies to continuously measure agent quality, safety, and reliability.
• Lead AI system hardening, regression testing, failure analysis, and production reliability efforts — defining metrics that validate agent accuracy and business outcomes.
  
  

Mentorship & Org‑Level Impact

• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers through design reviews, architecture forums, and hands-on guidance on agent design, NLP techniques, and system tradeoffs.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, and data platform teams to translate business needs into scalable AI solutions, and influence roadmap decisions with technical depth and long-term platform thinking.
  
  

Required Qualifications (Non‑Negotiable)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience building backend services, distributed systems, or data/AI platforms.
• Strong proficiency in Java and Spring Boot with extensive experience building large-scale distributed APIs, microservices, and cloud-native backend systems.
• Deep understanding of distributed system design, scalability, fault tolerance, and cloud‑native architectures.
• Proven experience designing and operating production systems with SQL and NoSQL data stores.
  
  

Preferred / Differentiating Skills

• Experience with Agent Harness, Agent Skills, and agentic patterns including tool calling, planning loops, memory, self-reflection, and multi-step reasoning (LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar).
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, vector databases, and MCP integrations.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks, AI governance solutions, or production-grade agent observability platforms.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD pipelines.
  
  

Why We Think You'll Love Teradata

We prioritize a people-first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well-being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are an anti-racist company because our dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is more than a statement. It is a deep commitment to doing the work to foster an equitable environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.

Teradata invites all identities and backgrounds in the workplace. We work with deliberation and intent to ensure we are cultivating collaboration and inclusivity across our global organization. ​ We are proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, ancestry, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related conditions), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, military and veteran status, or any other legally protected status.