AI Engineer – Agentic Systems
We are looking for an AI Engineer to design, build, and maintain intelligent agentic systems that drive business automation and decision-making. You will work at the intersection of large language models, tool-use frameworks, and production engineering — creating autonomous AI agents that reason, plan, and act. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience with Python-based agentic frameworks and frontier AI platforms such as Anthropic Claude and OpenAI GPT-4o.
Important Disclaimers:
**Please note: A few of our roles may require in-person interviews at Cognizant offices or client locations, depending on project or client needs.**
**Candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States without the need for employer sponsorship, now or at any time in the future**
In this role, you will:
- Design and build agentic AI pipelines using Python and LLM frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, or similar).
- Develop multi-step agents capable of reasoning, planning, and executing complex workflows autonomously.
- Integrate frontier AI models — Claude (Anthropic) and GPT-4o (OpenAI) — for code generation, summarization, and task automation.
- Build RAG pipelines and apply prompt optimization techniques to improve agent performance.
- Collaborate with product and platform teams to translate business requirements into agentic AI solutions.
- Monitor deployed agents in production — tracking token usage, latency, failure modes, and hallucination rates.
- Document architecture decisions, agent design patterns, and operational runbooks.
Work model: Hybrid / Remote
Location: Rockville, Maryland
What you need to have to be considered:
- 3+ years of Python development, including async patterns and API integration
- Hands-on experience building AI agents with LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent frameworks
- Familiarity with agent architectures such as ReAct or Plan-and-Execute
- Proficiency with Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI APIs, including tool use and function calling
- Experience building RAG pipelines with vector databases
- Strong prompt engineering skills (chain-of-thought, few-shot, structured outputs)
- Basic cloud deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with Docker
Good to Have
- Fine-tuning methodologies (LoRA, RLHF, DPO, SFT)
- Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines
- Agent evaluation frameworks (RAGAS, DeepEval)
- Observability tooling (LangSmith, Weights & Biases, Arize Phoenix)
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations
- OCR / Document Intelligence services
- GitHub Copilot experience
- Enterprise security for LLM deployments (PII masking, audit logging)
- Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry
- Multimodal or voice agent experience
Salary and Other Compensation:
The annual salary for this position is between $120,500K – $141,500 K depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate.
This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans.
Benefits: Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:
- Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
- Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off
- 401(k) plan and contributions
- Long-term/Short-term Disability
- Paid Parental Leave
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Disclaimer: The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law
Acerca de Cognizant
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) es un creador de soluciones de IA y proveedor de servicios tecnológicos que conecta la inversión en IA con el valor empresarial mediante el desarrollo de soluciones de IA full‑stack para sus clientes. Su profundo conocimiento de la industria, junto con su experiencia en procesos e ingeniería, permite incorporar el contexto único de cada organización en sistemas tecnológicos que amplifican el potencial humano, generan resultados tangibles y mantienen a las empresas a la vanguardia en un entorno en constante cambio. Más información en cognizant.ai o @cognizant.
Información adicional sobre el empleo
La información sobre la compensación es exacta en la fecha de publicación de este anuncio. Cognizant se reserva el derecho de modificar esta información en cualquier momento, de conformidad con la legislación aplicable.
Es posible que se solicite a los solicitantes que asistan a entrevistas de forma presencial o mediante videoconferencia. Asimismo, durante cada entrevista, los candidatos podrán estar obligados a presentar un documento de identidad válido emitido por el estado o por el gobierno.
Cognizant es un empleador que ofrece igualdad de oportunidades. Su solicitud y candidatura no se evaluarán en función de la raza, el color, el sexo, la religión, el credo, la orientación sexual, la identidad de género, el origen nacional, la discapacidad, la información genética, el embarazo, la condición de veterano ni cualquier otra característica protegida por las leyes federales, estatales o locales.
