Senior Software Engineer (Agentic AI)

Senior Software Engineer (Agentic AI)

Location: Calgary, Alberta (Remote-Friendly)

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for our Conversational AI & Agents practice. You'll build agentic chat experiences that enable effective customer interactions.

As a senior contributor, you'll own full-stack development from design to release. You'll work with cross-functional teams to define architecture, shape product experiences, and build applications using modern best practices.

Key Responsibilities

Agentic AI Solution Architecture & Feature Development

• Evaluate the LLM/tooling landscape and choose the right model, framework, and runtime for each job.
• Work productively in modern AI-first dev environments such as Cursor, Zed, and IDEs with AI assistants like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot.
• Architect clean, modular, and reusable agentic systems that scale, are easy to evolve, and increase team throughput.
• Build and harden RAG and agent pipelines end to end - retrieval, orchestration, tool use, guardrails, telemetry, and evals.
• Continuously improve performance, cost, accessibility, reliability, and maintainability.

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Mentor engineers on agent frameworks and conversational UI best practices.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers, and stakeholders on technical direction.
• Make architectural decisions emphasizing scalability, robustness, and reliability.
• Set coding standards, architecture patterns, documentation quality, and operational practices, maintain code quality through reviews, testing, and documentation standards.
• Ensure delivery excellence - clear roadmaps, realistic plans, risk management, and crisp execution.
• Align with Robots & Pencils AI principles, client guidelines for AI development and deployment, safe and responsible AI practices.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with product managers, designers, user experience professionals, and platform engineers to define requirements and success criteria.
• Participate in backlog grooming, sprint planning, QA reviews, incident response, and RCA.
• Operate within agile processes to hit dates without trading away quality or stability.

Offshore Team Collaboration

• Coordinate with offshore team members to ensure consistent delivery and high code quality.
• Share architectural guidance, codebase documentation, and technical artifacts across distributed teams.
• Support time zone-aware collaboration and unblock developers as needed to maintain momentum.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of professional software development with significant ownership of architecture and delivery.
• 3+ years of Python in ML/AI systems, including PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• 1+ years building with Generative AI: LLM agents, prompt engineering, LangGraph, LangChain.
• Hands-on RAG experience - semantic chunking, metadata enrichment, embeddings, retrieval quality, and latency/cost tuning.
• Experience with vector stores such as pgvector, Weaviate, or Chroma.
• Understanding of modern AI interoperability standards such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and AI communication standards.
• Strong cloud and IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation) background - AWS, Azure, or GCP - plus containerization and distributed systems fundamentals.
• Strong AWS expertise: services, solid grasp of compute, networking, storage, security, and container platforms.
• Solid SDLC practices - testing strategies, CI/CD, code reviews, observability, and incident management.
• Upper-intermediate English, written and spoken.

Nice To Have

• Knowledge of advanced RAG patterns - Adaptive RAG, Agentic RAG, Self-RAG - and retrieval evaluation methods.
• Experience building agentic applications with LangGraph, LangChain, or AutoGen, familiarity with patterns and techniques such as ReAct (Reason + Act), Chain-of-Thought, Tree-of-Thoughts.
• MLOps/AIOps exposure - model deployment, lifecycle, governance, safety, red-teaming, data/privacy controls, prompt/version management, offline and online evals using managed services and/or Docker/Kubernetes with MLOps best practices.
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning techniques - SFT, RLHF, DPO, PEFT, LoRA/QLoRA - on hyperscalers’ platforms like AWS SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, or Azure ML.
• Experience with production support and/or deployment on AWS, Azure, or GCP using modern CI/CD.
• Front-end skills useful for chat UX - TypeScript, React/Next.js, real-time messaging, and design systems.

Personal Competencies

• Accountability – Owns full stack delivery with quality, reliability, and attention to detail.
• Adaptability – Thrives in dynamic, fast-paced client environments.
• Collaboration – Builds strong partnerships across teams and time zones.
• Execution-Focused – Delivers maintainable, scalable solutions without overengineering.
• Innovation-Minded – Brings curiosity and experimentation to technology decisions.
• Craftsmanship – Cares deeply about code quality, architecture, and user experience.

Why Join Robots & Pencils?

We don’t just ship features, we build digital-first products that matter. As a Senior Engineer, you’ll join a team that values deep craft, cross-functional collaboration, and relentless focus on quality. You’ll work on impactful agentic AI applications using modern technologies, while influencing engineering culture and best practices across the organization.