Senior Generalist Engineer

Job Posting Organization:
The organization is the largest nonprofit dedicated to combating poverty, disease, and inequity globally. Founded on the principle that all individuals, regardless of their identity or circumstances, deserve the opportunity to lead healthy and productive lives, the organization emphasizes diversity among its employees to reflect the populations it serves. It offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage without premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, retirement contributions, and opportunities for employee engagement. The organization is committed to fostering a supportive work environment that promotes both personal and professional growth.

Job Overview:
The position of Senior Generalist Engineer involves designing and building modern AI systems, including agentic systems, retrieval pipelines, and backend services. The role is crucial for developing software that has a tangible impact on global public health initiatives. The engineer will work collaboratively within the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) at the Gates Foundation, which focuses on using computational modeling tools to support efforts in eradicating infectious diseases. The engineer will be responsible for creating reliable backend services, evaluating AI systems, and mentoring other engineers while ensuring that the solutions developed are practical and effective in addressing real-world problems.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Design and build agentic AI systems that include multi-step workflows, tool usage, and autonomous task orchestration using modern LLM frameworks, ensuring they are shipped as reliable backend services.
• Build and operate retrieval systems that involve data ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, and knowledge-graph-backed retrieval.
• Create AI evaluation pipelines and benchmarks to assess the performance of agents, models, or retrieval systems, monitoring them in production.
• Architect, implement, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that support other engineers, researchers, and applications.
• Make senior-level architectural decisions regarding model choice, hosting options, and framework selection, while mentoring other engineers on AI application patterns.
• Develop data pipelines and workflows utilizing Azure services and Hugging Face.
• Transition successful prototypes into production, ensuring they are tested, observable, and well-documented.
• Collaborate with researchers and program staff to translate complex domain problems into actionable software solutions.
• Identify gaps in knowledge, data, or tooling and propose practical solutions to address these issues.

Required Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s degree in a technical field with at least 5 years of experience in building production software, or equivalent experience; an advanced degree is a plus but not mandatory.
• Strong backend engineering skills, with the ability to debug and ship services effectively.
• Proficiency in Python, particularly for AI applications such as PyTorch or Hugging Face.
• Hands-on experience in developing LLM-powered applications, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic workflows.
• Experience in designing and operating backend APIs and services in cloud environments, preferably Azure, but AWS or GCP are acceptable.
• Familiarity with AI evaluations and observability, including measuring quality, cost, and latency of LLM systems.
• Experience with data pipelines, ETL processes, and MLOps workflows.
• Proficiency in Git, CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and DevOps practices.
• Ability to make architectural tradeoffs and mentor others in these decisions. 1
• Experience working with researchers and translating complex problems into software solutions.

Educational Background:
A Bachelor’s degree in a technical field is required, with a preference for candidates holding advanced degrees. The educational background should ideally include coursework or experience related to software engineering, computer science, or a related discipline that equips the candidate with the necessary technical skills for the role.

Experience:
Candidates should have a minimum of 5 years of experience in building production software. This experience should include strong backend engineering capabilities, familiarity with AI applications, and a proven track record of taking projects from prototype to production. Experience in cloud environments and working with researchers is also essential.

Languages:
Proficiency in English is mandatory, as it is the primary language of communication within the organization. Additional languages may be beneficial but are not required for this position.

Additional Notes:
This is a 36-month limited-term position based in Seattle, WA, with relocation assistance provided. The salary range for this role is between $186,400 to $288,800 USD, with higher ranges applicable in Seattle and Washington D.C. The organization emphasizes a mission-driven approach to compensation, balancing competitive pay with its overarching goals. Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, and the organization is committed to providing an inclusive hiring experience, accommodating candidates with disabilities or medical conditions as needed.