
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.
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