Generative AI Engineer

Cognizant Romania is home to 2400+ creative technologists and is one of Eastern Europe's largest Software Product Engineering delivery networks. We serve global clients in several industries, including Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Communication Media & Technology, and Retail & MLEU (manufacturing, logistics, energy & utilities). Cognizant Romania was established in 2018 when Cognizant acquired Softvision, a company founded in the late 1990s in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We continue to build on our history as the preferred engineering partner for thriving Silicon Valley tech companies, now as a prominent Cognizant next generation studio. We are seeking a talented and experienced Generative AI Engineer to join our team. _Key Responsibilities_ * Design and build complex agentic systems with multiple interacting agents. * Implement robust orchestration logic (state machines / graphs, retries, fallbacks, escalation to humans). * Implement RAG pipelines, tool calling, and sophisticated system prompts for optimal reliability, latency, and cost control. * Apply core ML concepts to evaluate and improve agent performance, including dataset curation and bias/safety checks. * Lead the development of agents using Google ADK and/or LangGraph, leveraging advanced features for orchestration, memory, evaluation, and observability. * Integrate with supporting libraries and infrastructure (e.g., LangChain/LlamaIndex, vector databases, message queues, monitoring tools) with minimal supervision. * Define success metrics, build evaluation suites for agents (automatic + human evaluation), and drive continuous improvement. * Curate and maintain comprehensive prompt/test datasets; run regression tests for new model versions and prompt changes. * Deploy and operate AI services in production, establishing CI/CD pipelines, observability, logging, and tracing. * Debug complex failures end-to-end, identifying and document root causes across models, prompts, APIs, tools, and data. * Work closely with product managers and stakeholders to shape requirements, translate them into agent capabilities, and manage expectations. * Document comprehensive designs, decisions, and runbooks for complex systems. _Must-Have Qualifications_ Education & experience * 4+ years of experience as Software Engineer / ML Engineer / AI Engineer, with at least 1-2 years working directly with LLMs in real applications (not just experiments or coursework). * Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). Core technical skills: _Programming & software engineering:_ * _Strong proficiency in Python (core language features, packaging, testing, async, type hints)._ * _Very strong software engineering practices: version control (Git), unit/integration testing, code reviews, CI/CD._ * _Experience building and consuming REST/gRPC APIs and integrating external tools/services._ _Machine Learning (good understanding):_ * _Understanding of core ML concepts: supervised/unsupervised learning, train/validation/test splits, overfitting, regularization, and common metrics (precision, recall, F1, ROC-AUC, etc.)._ * _Good undeerstanding of deep learning basics (neural networks, embeddings) and at least one ML/DL framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, scikit-learn)._ _LLMs & agentic AI (very strong understanding):_ * Deep practical knowledge of large language models: * Tokenization, context windows, temperature, top-p, system vs user prompts. * Prompt engineering patterns (ReAct, chain-of-thought, tool-calling/tool-use). * Fine-tuning / adapters / instruction-tuning, or experience with RAG as an alternative. * Experience building LLM-powered applications end-to-end: from idea → prototype → production. * Familiarity with safety and reliability considerations: hallucinations, guardrails, content filtering, privacy. _Agentic frameworks (required understanding, experience preferred):_ * Conceptual understanding of modern agentic frameworks and patterns (stateful graphs, multi-agent coordination, human-in-the-loop, memory, and evaluation). * Hands-on experience with at least one of: * Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) – building multi-agent workflows, using its orchestration, tools, and evaluation features. * LangGraph – designing graph-based, stateful agent workflows with cycles, branches, and durable execution. * Candidates must be able to read, reason about, and extend ADK/LangGraph-based codebases. * Direct production experience with both ADK and LangGraph is a strong plus. _Data & infra:_ * Experience working with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Chroma) for retrieval-augmented generation. * Comfortable with SQL and basic data modeling. * Experience deploying on at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, Azure) and using managed services (e.g., serverless runtimes, container orchestration, secrets management). _Soft skills:_ * Ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into concrete technical designs. * Strong communication skills; able to explain trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. * Comfort working in an experimental environment with rapid iteration, but with a strong bias towards production quality and maintainability. _Nice-to-Have_ _Experience with:_ * Vertex AI / Gemini or other hosted LLM ecosystems. * Related frameworks and tools: LangChain, LlamaIndex, semantic search, evaluation frameworks (e.g., RAGAS, custom eval harnesses). * Monitoring and observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana/NewRelic, Datadog, etc.). _Background in one or more of:_ * Information retrieval / search. * NLP (beyond LLMs): classic text processing, embeddings, semantic similarity. * Security & compliance for AI systems (PII handling, access control, audit logging). * Contributions to open-source AI projects, blog posts, or talks about LLMs/agentic systems. Cognizant Romania Employee Benefits: * Flexible Work Schedule - Outside of main work hours, you can create a schedule that suits your needs * Hybrid workplace - Whether you like to work from home or go to the office, the choice is yours * Annual Vacation Days - 26 days to relax, explore and spend time with loved ones * Trainings, workshops, and certifications, unlimited Udemy subscription and more * Private medical package * Meal tickets * Referral bonuses * Life insurance * Banking services * Bookster _Please note that only suitable candidates will be contacted and that by applying to this role you are being informed about your personal data being processed by Cognizant._ _You can find more details here: https://www.cognizant.com/us/en/privacy-notice_