Python Developer

Senior AI Engineer

Code Generation, Agent Architecture & LLM Systems

📍 Mumbai (On-site) | Full-time | 5+ years

About the Role:

Unico Connect is an AI-first technology partner that builds custom mobile, web, and AI products for clients across multiple geographies.

We are hiring a Senior AI Engineer for a dedicated client engagement focused on building an AI-powered application builder platform - a product where users describe software in plain English and the system generates, previews, and iteratively refines working code.

The mandatory requirement for this role is hands-on production experience shipping LLM-powered systems with agent architectures, with experience in code generation or developer tooling contexts a strong advantage.

The role is product-focused and deeply hands-on. You will own everything between the user's prompt and correct code landing in the project: the agentic loop, code generation pipeline, context management, evaluation suite, and model cost strategy.

You will work alongside the Senior MLOps Engineer who operationalises the infrastructure around your system, and collaborate closely with backend, frontend, and DevOps engineers.

Responsibilities:

Agent Architecture

Design and own the agentic loop for the platform - request interpretation, planning, tool-calling sequence (read file, edit file, run build, search code, install package), and stop conditions.

Make and revisit architectural decisions on single-agent vs. multi-agent designs, including planner/executor splits and dedicated build-repair sub-agents.

Code Generation Pipeline

Own the end-to-end generation flow: task classification, context gathering, planning, targeted edits, verification, and commit.

Implement diff/search-replace-based file editing with fuzzy matching and fallback strategies.

Enforce scope discipline so the agent makes minimal diffs and does not modify code it was not asked to touch.

Self-Repair Loop

Build and tune the automated repair loop that pipes compiler, lint, build, and runtime errors back to the model with retry budgets and model escalation.

This loop is the primary quality lever - the difference between 60-70% and 90%+ build success rates.

Context Management

Build file-relevance retrieval so the agent sees the right files, not the whole codebase: dependency graphs, AST/tree-sitter-based chunking, embeddings, recency signals, and hybrid retrieval.

Implement conversation summarisation and memory for long sessions, and address long-project degradation through codebase summaries and periodic consistency passes.

Own token budgeting and prompt caching strategy.

Prompt Engineering as a Discipline

Own the system prompt and per-task prompt variants (new feature, bug fix, styling change).

Maintain few-shot examples and enforce coding conventions, stack rules, and prohibited behaviours such as no hardcoded secrets and no whole-file rewrites.

Version prompts like code with changelogs and rollback capability.

Evaluation and Quality Measurement

Design and own the evaluation suite: representative test prompts run on every prompt and model change, scored on build success rate, instruction adherence, and output quality including LLM-as-judge and visual/screenshot checks where relevant.

Define regression gates that block quality-degrading changes from shipping.

Treat evals the way engineers treat automated testing: versioned, automated, and tracked over time.

This responsibility is non-negotiable at this level.

Model Strategy and Cost

Design model routing - cheap and fast models for classification and small edits, frontier models for complex generation.

Drive cost optimisation through prompt caching, diff-based edits over full-file rewrites, and tighter context selection.

Track cost per agent run and tokens per task; evaluate new model releases against the eval suite and lead migrations when results justify it.

Safety and Reliability of Agent Behaviour

Defend against prompt injection from user content and fetched web content.

Ensure secrets never appear in generated client code.

Define what the agent's tools may and may not do in collaboration with the platform team.

Contribute to output moderation and abuse-pattern awareness.

Mentorship and Engineering Standards

Run code reviews, define engineering conventions for AI work, and raise the engineering bar across the AI team.

Work closely with the Senior MLOps Engineer on handoff of eval design, prompt configurations, and model routing logic.

Requirements:

Hands-on Production Ownership of LLM-Powered Systems with Agent Architectures (Mandatory)

Must have personally shipped and operated at least one complex production AI system - agentic, multi-step, or code generation - with end-to-end ownership of architecture, evaluation, and cost.

POCs, internal demos, and tutorial-grade work do not qualify.

5+ Years of Professional Software or AI Engineering Experience

With at least 3 years focused on LLM applications, AI engineering, or production AI systems.

Candidates with strong backend backgrounds and a clear, substantive pivot into LLM systems qualify.

Strong Python Proficiency and Service Development

Production-grade Python with FastAPI or equivalent: type hints, async patterns, streaming responses, testing, and packaging.

Not notebook-only.

Depth Across LLM APIs and Agent Systems

Production experience with at least two of OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or open-weight models (vLLM, Ollama, Together).

Production experience with at least one agent framework (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, LlamaIndex Agents) or hand-rolled equivalent.

Hands-on with tool calling, structured outputs, and multi-step reasoning.

Demonstrated, Systematic Evaluation Practice - Non-Negotiable

Must have built evaluation harnesses that gate production releases, not ad-hoc testing.

Hands-on with at least one of LangSmith, Langfuse, Promptfoo, Ragas, or DeepEval.

Candidates with no systematic answer to evaluation should not be considered at senior level regardless of other strengths.

Cost Discipline for Production AI

Track record of measurable cost optimisation on production AI features.

Able to speak in specifics: cost per request, savings achieved through caching or model routing, context reduction decisions.

AWS Working Knowledge

Hands-on with EC2, S3, IAM, and Docker.

Comfort with CI/CD workflows and deploying AI services.

Awareness of LLM Security Failure Modes

Familiar with prompt injection patterns, understands that system prompt rules alone are insufficient, and has experience with output validation and content safety in production.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AST/tree-sitter tooling, diff-based editing systems, or compiler-adjacent work
• MCP server authoring
• Open-source AI contributions
• Published technical writing on LLM systems
• Multi-modal model experience
• Fine-tuning exposure (LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT)

My Client's India is its largest studio outside USA with 400+ people and growing rapidly. It manages some of the biggest global games in the Casual Gaming, Action Strategy, Match-3, Slots, and Invest Express genres. The game teams are responsible for the long term-vision of the game, its entire Game Design & Tuning, Product Roadmap, Features, Content & Creative decisions, Art work (2D, 3D, Animation), Development, QA/Testing, Analytics & Performance Tracking, User Acquisition & Live Operations.

The India team is full of passionate gamers, who love to play, build great products, and have fun doing it. Studio I expect continued growth and is looking for strong leaders to expand the studio into this next growth phase.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be responsible for the software design of large scale applications and features & enhancements which reaches millions of players. You should be passionate about players, performance, scalability and holds a very high bar for quality of the game.

Responsibilities

• Work with Product Management to translate business requirements into technical requirements.
• Owns technical roadmap, design and review for end-to-end games, ensure design quality and integrity
• Modernizing the tech stack
• Bring tech innovations in the game which will help in growth of the games
• Design, code, and develop new features/fix bugs/add enhancements
• Analyze and improve efficiency, scalability and stability of various system resources
• Lead and Mentor junior engineers and drive a culture of technical perfection.
• Drive creative and innovative solutions to complex problems, exemplifying good technical discernment.
• Drive improvements and new approaches to address potential systemic pain points and technical debt, anticipate and avoid problems.
• Take a hands-on approach in the development of prototypes, independently and with others, to establish design decisions and/or technical feasibility.

Required Skills

• Masters or Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or equivalent
• A minimum of 7 years of professional experience in software development, mobile, desktop or web application development with hands on coding experience covering full stack
• Experience coding in C#, C++, Python, Javascript and SQL
• Working knowledge of mobile landscape, architectures, trends, and emerging technologies.
• A proven foundation in computer science, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, OOPS and software design
• Strong problem solving and debugging skills
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a team environment.

Desired Skills

• Experience with mobile development – Android/iOS/Native OR on game engines such as Cocos-2D, Unity or other.

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (EC2, ELBs, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, terraform etc)
• Experience with setting up server monitoring, alerting and server provisioning
• Familiarity with micro service architecture, containers and related technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)
• Experience with development tools & integrated build systems: XCode, IntelliJ, Git/Jenkins
• Experience of driving activities, review process to ensure software and product quality.
• Willing to pick up any languages, technologies, or methodologies necessary to smite a challenge—and if a conventional solution does not exist, then innovate as necessary.

What we offer you:

• Work in a studio that has complete P&L ownership of games
• Competitive salary, discretionary annual bonus scheme and  RSUs
• Full medical, accident as well as life insurance benefits
• Catered breakfast, lunch and evening snacks
• Child care facilities for women employees and discounted facilities for male employees
• Well stocked pantry
• Generous Paid Maternity/Paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Programs
• Active Employee Resource Groups – Women 
• Frequent employee events
• Additional leave options for most employees
• Flexible working hours on many teams
• Casual dress every single day
• Work with cool people and impact millions of daily players!

Basic Qualifications:

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• Programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
• 1+ years of experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems.

Additional Job requirements

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science/Math or equivalent
• BS in computer science or related field.
• 2+ years of relevant professional software development experience: designing, developing, and delivering software written in Java, C#, or C++, web development.
• Knowledgeable in object-oriented design patterns.
• Experience building highly scalable and distributed systems

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with service-oriented architecture and application/services development
• Passion for performance debugging and benchmarking

Ability to clearly and concisely communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders across all levels of the organization

Skills Required for Back-End (NodeJS) JR Developer (2-4 Yrs) /Sr Developer (4-8 Yrs) /Lead Developer (8-10 Yrs) /Architect (10-12 Yrs):

• Must: Strong experience and understanding of NodeJS and JavaScript Programming, Good at Native Cloud or AWS
• Good knowledge of MongoDB or any other NoSQL Database, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc.
• Good understanding of scalable computing systems, software architecture, data structures, and algorithms.
• Experience working with AWS or other cloud providers
• Experience in service-oriented and/or microservice architectures
• Good to have knowledge with stream processing applications, Event-driven Architecture, Identity management (OAuth) - Not Mandatory
• Good knowledge of Redis, its data types, and their use cases along with a server-side framework
• Experience developing and deploying REST APIs.
• Good to have an understanding of low-level Kafka inner workings and partitioning schemes - Not Mandatory

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, review and evolve durable, highly scalable event-driven infrastructure
• Architect and lead the development of backend services.
• Work with REST APIs and integrating them with our software platform
• Develop front end capabilities such as dashboards, visualizations, features
• Work on building best performance UI features and linking with backend
• Integrate all the front end features with a backend pipeline 
• Integrate our AI models with the platform pipeline 
• Work on bug fixing and improving application performance 
• Unit-test code for robustness, including edge cases, usability, and general reliability
• Own new initiatives, Debug production issues
• Help define the way we work in the future including coding and design standards
• Work effectively in an agile development process
• Research cutting edge technology that can be applied to accelerate business growth
• Be the communication bridge be product owners and development teams

The ideal candidate is a self-motivated, multi-tasker, and demonstrated team-player. You will be a senior developer responsible for the development of new software products and enhancements to existing products. You should excel in working with large-scale applications and frameworks and have outstanding communication and leadership skills.

Responsibilities:

• Writing clean, high-quality, high-performance, maintainable code
• Develop and support software including applications, database integration, interfaces, and new functionality enhancements
• Coordinate cross-functionally to insure project meets business objectives and compliance standards
• Support test and deployment of new products and features
• Participate in code reviews

Requirements:

• B.Tech from Tier 1 College.
• 3+ yrs of experience, at least 2 yrs of experience with Python and Django.
• Expertise in Object Oriented Design, Database Design, and XML Schema
• Experience with Agile or Scrum software development methodologies
• Ability to multi-task, organise, and prioritise work