AI Developer - Hybrid​/Remote

AI Developer – Hybrid/Remote

University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign

The AI Developer within Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) designs, builds, and deploys AI‑enabled applications by translating functional requirements into technical solutions and selecting appropriate AI approaches. The role develops and integrates AI services across cloud and on‑premises environments, creating secure, scalable code and backend services that align with system‑wide privacy, security, and accessibility standards. The AI Developer configures monitoring of AI solutions, troubleshoots production issues, and supports ongoing operations, upgrades, and lifecycle management of AI systems.

The position works closely with data, security, compliance, and business teams to deliver high‑quality, responsible AI solutions and provides technical guidance to users and stakeholders. The role also stays current with emerging technologies and contributes to continuous improvement across AI practices and solutions.

• Business & Stakeholder Engagement
  • Translate functional business problems into technical AI requirements.
  • Assess use cases for prompt engineering, low‑code tools, RAG, or custom development.
  • Communicate progress, risks, and results to technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
  • Provide guidance on AI best practices, prompt engineering, and automation.
  • Determine ROI and development complexity to prioritize viable solutions.
  • Collaborate with security, privacy, accessibility, and compliance teams to ensure policy adherence (FERPA, HIPAA, data classification, accessibility standards).
• AI Development & Engineering
  • Design, prototype, and develop AI‑enabled applications and services using current and emerging platforms.
  • Build data pipelines for model training, fine‑tuning, evaluation, and monitoring.
  • Develop custom algorithms, prompts, and inference workflows tailored to business requirements.
  • Integrate AI services and APIs into existing systems and applications.
  • Write clean, efficient, maintainable code in Python, JavaScript/Type Script, or Java.
  • Develop secure, accessible, scalable backend services and microservices.
  • Implement automated testing, CI/CD, performance optimization, and version control practices.
  • Perform unit testing and prepare solutions for user acceptance testing.
  • Create documentation for architecture, design patterns, development processes, and support purposes.
• AI Solution Deployment & Ops
  • Deploy AI components and applications to Azure, AWS, GCP, or on‑prem AI servers.
  • Configure monitoring, logging, and analytics for AI endpoints.
  • Troubleshoot production issues and optimize reliability, latency, and cost.
  • Assist in maintaining model and endpoint life cycles.
• Data Stewardship
  • Partner with data teams to understand data sources, quality, structure, and use‑case requirements.
  • Assist in data preprocessing, labeling, feature engineering, and evaluation.
  • Ensure compliance with data privacy, security, and governance standards.
• Support
  • Support production activities associated with AI solutions (may involve evening or weekend hours).
  • Provide testing, configuration, and maintenance support for scheduled upgrades and outages.
  • Offer technical guidance to users and collect feedback for continuous improvement.
• Other Duties
  • Stay current with emerging AI capabilities, tools, and best practices.
  • Perform other duties as assigned that are appropriate for an AI Developer.

• High school diploma or equivalent.
• Two (24) months of experience from the following categories:
  • College coursework in IT, IT Management, Programming, IT systems, or a related discipline.
  • Work experience in IT‑related functions (hardware/software support, programming, network design, etc.).

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 3+ years of professional software development experience.
• Experience building or integrating with web APIs and working with common data formats.
• Experience with cloud AI platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, Vertex AI, etc.).
• Experience with LLM orchestration or RAG workflows (Lang Chain, etc.).
• Experience…