Agentic AI Engineer

Overview

Item.com is seeking an Agentic AI Engineer to build, deploy, and operate reliable AI agents that interact with business systems, data, APIs, and human operators. Contract position. Must work U.S. PST hours.

Responsibilities

• Create agentic systems that safely complete multi-step work.
• Make agent behavior observable, measurable, recoverable, and cost-conscious.
• Turn real business workflows into reliable agent-assisted capabilities.
• Build agents using tools, APIs, retrieval, structured outputs, state, and human approval paths.
• Design execution flows with clear permissions, validation, retries, timeouts, escalation, and recovery behavior.
  
  

Minimum Requirements:

• Implement agent evaluation, tracing, observability, cost controls, and operational metrics.
• Develop secure tool interfaces and control access to data and downstream actions.
• Analyze agent failures and improve prompts, tools, policy, workflow design, and fallback paths.
• Partner with product and operations teams to define safe autonomy boundaries.
• Demonstrate ownership of production AI/LLM applications with agentic behavior.
  
  

Preferred Requirements:

• Strong Python and/or TypeScript engineering capability; experience with APIs, backend services, cloud, and data stores.
• Practical experience with tool calling, retrieval, state, orchestration, evaluation, and production observability.
• Ability to explain permissions, human review, hallucination containment, tool failure, and incident response.
• Framework familiarity is useful, but evidence of engineering and operational ownership matters more.