AI Engineer

Illumina is seeking an early-career AI Engineer to join their team in San Diego. You will build and ship production AI features including LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, and backend services. Work alongside senior engineers to evaluate models, optimize systems, and contribute to the AI platform. This role offers strong mentorship and growth opportunities.

• Build and ship features in production AI applications, including LLM integrations, prompt workflows, retrieval pipelines, and supporting backend services.
• Develop and maintain components of RAG systems: data ingestion, chunking, embedding generation, retrieval logic.
• Write clean, tested, documented Python code; build internal tools and prototypes.
• Evaluate model performance, prompt variations, retrieval strategies; develop evaluation datasets and regression checks.
• Analyze production logs for quality issues, latency bottlenecks, cost optimization; contribute to incident response.
• Participate in code reviews, design discussions, and team rituals; document work clearly.

• 1-2 years professional software engineering experience (internships, co-ops, open source count).
• Strong Python skills with modular, testable code.
• Experience calling LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-weight models) in at least one project.
• Familiarity with RAG systems, prompt engineering, vector databases, embeddings, or basic agent patterns.
• Solid foundation in Git, REST APIs, JSON, SQL, and at least one cloud environment.
• Strong communication skills and willingness to engage in technical discussion.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field.