SQM Infrastructure Product Development AI Engineer at Northern Trust in Chicago, IL

Job description

About Northern Trust As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions. Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide. With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. Job Description: AI Engineer – Generative AI & Product Engineering Role Overview We are seeking a hands-on AI Engineer with strong product development experience to design, build, and deploy enterprise-grade Generative AI solutions. The ideal candidate combines expertise in LLMs, RAG, agentic AI, Python, Azure, and cloud-native engineering with a product mindset focused on scalability, reliability, security, and user experience. The engineer will work across the full product lifecycle, from architecture and prototyping through API development, deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and production support. Key Responsibilities Design and develop enterprise Generative AI and agentic AI applications using LangChain/LangSmith and LangGraph . Build multi-step and stateful AI workflows involving reasoning, tool integration, retrieval, and human-in-the-loop patterns. Develop Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions using PostgreSQL and pgvector for vector storage and semantic retrieval. Integrate applications with Azure OpenAI and other LLM-based services. Design effective prompts and reusable prompt patterns using advanced prompt engineering techniques. Build scalable backend services and REST APIs using Python and FastAPI . Develop evaluation and observability mechanisms for measuring AI response quality, latency, reliability, and retrieval effectiveness. Use LangSmith for tracing, evaluation, debugging, and observability of LLM/agent workflows. Containerize and deploy AI services to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) . Design solutions using appropriate Azure services for identity, security, networking, storage, monitoring, and application integration. Implement production-ready practices including exception handling, logging, retries, API security, configuration management, and observability. Work closely with product owners, architects, and engineering teams to convert business requirements into scalable AI product capabilities. Participate in architecture/design reviews, code reviews, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and ongoing product enhancement. Evaluate emerging LLM, retrieval, agentic AI, and AI engineering techniques and apply them where they provide measurable product value. Partner with application, infrastructure, cloud, database, and operations teams during major incidents and production issues to identify dependencies and resolve problems. Required Technical Skills Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) Azure OpenAI Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Prompt Engineering Agentic AI / AI Agents LLM evaluation and observability AI Frameworks LangChain LangGraph LangSmith Application Engineering Python FastAPI REST APIs Async/API development Microservices architecture Data & Vector Search PostgreSQL pgvector Vector embeddings Semantic/vector search RAG retrieval and indexing patterns Cloud & Deployment Microsoft Azure Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Containers/Docker Cloud-native application development CI/CD and production deployment practices Product Development Experience The candidate should demonstrate experience taking AI capabilities beyond proof-of-concept into production products , including: Translating business requirements into technical product capabilitie