Job Description & Details
If you are tired of roles that just wrap basic APIs around pre-built chatbot platforms and call it AI engineering, this 9 to 12-month contract in Plano is a refreshing shift toward actual software development. This gig focuses heavily on hands-on coding, model integration, and test automation rather than superficial prompt engineering. You are going to be building robust AI pipelines and making sure they don't break in production.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will be rooted in writing production-grade code, building out end-to-end AI workflows, and constructing rigorous test automation frameworks for intelligent systems. Instead of just tinkering with UI wrappers, you will tackle the messy reality of data ingestion, latency optimization, and ensuring your models behave predictably under load. Expect to spend a solid chunk of your time writing unit and integration tests specifically designed for non-deterministic AI outputs.
The Core Tech Stack
Python is non-negotiable here, and you will need deep fluency in standard libraries, async programming, and API integration. More importantly, the team expects you to understand testing frameworks like pytest or similar automation tools tailored for AI/ML validation. You need to know how to mock responses, benchmark model performance, and cleanly integrate machine learning components into larger, existing enterprise architectures without introducing massive technical debt.
Interview Expectations
Be prepared for a hiring manager who is going to push past your portfolio and ask you to live-code a complex data parsing or automation script on the spot. They are secretly looking to see if you can write clean, maintainable code under pressure, rather than just knowing how to copy-paste snippets from documentation. They will also drill down into your testing strategy—expect them to ask how you validate an AI system whose outputs change based on temperature or prompt variance.
Application Advice
When updating your resume for this role, drop the fluff about generic AI enthusiasm and highlight your actual engineering chops, specifically mentioning your experience with test automation, CI/CD pipelines for Python, and complex backend integrations. Make sure keywords like 'test automation', 'Python development', and 'API integration' are front and center so you can easily bypass the initial keyword filters and get straight to the technical screen.