Senior Agentic AI Engineer - Conversational AI

Cognizant is seeking a Senior Agentic AI Engineer focused on Conversational AI to design, develop, and deliver enterprise-grade conversational and agentic AI solutions. This role partners with global engineering teams to build scalable AI-powered applications that leverage cloud technologies and large language models for client outcomes.

Location is Minneapolis, MN with a remote work arrangement for qualified applicants. Compensation for this position is USD 110,000 to 130,000 per year, depending on experience and other qualifications.

What you’ll do

• Lead onshore and offshore development teams while driving hands-on development, solution design, and architecture aligned to client requirements.
• Collaborate with QA and UAT teams to support testing, resolve issues, and help ensure successful delivery.
• Work with architects, developers, QA teams, product stakeholders, and business leaders to build scalable AI-powered applications using modern cloud technologies and large language models.

Required experience and skills

• 10 to 14 years of experience in software engineering, solution design, and technical leadership, with proven success delivering enterprise-scale conversational AI or Generative AI solutions.
• Experience with AWS Lex or other deterministic bot development.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock and Bedrock AgentCore, including production-grade Generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock.
• Experience with AWS Strands SDK / Framework.
• Experience building voice bots and chat bots.
• Experience with agentic AI application development and orchestration, including LLM tool calling, function calling, and agent workflows.
• Knowledge of intent modeling, conversation design, prompt engineering, and NLU concepts.
• Experience developing and orchestrating AI agents using Bedrock AgentCore and AWS Strands, including LLM orchestration frameworks, tool integrations, and multi-agent workflows.
• Ability to implement and evaluate prompt engineering practices, model evaluation, grounding, and agent performance tuning.
• Experience monitoring and troubleshooting production AI agents and conversational AI systems.
• Experience securing enterprise AI agents, including guardrails, prompt injection mitigation, data protection, access controls, and responsible AI controls.
• Experience optimizing LLM agents for accuracy, latency, scalability, reliability, observability, and cost efficiency.

Optional (helpful) experience

• Experience implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.

Key technologies

• AWS Lex
• AWS Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon Bedrock
• AWS Strands SDK / Framework
• AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, DynamoDB
• API Gateway, IAM, CloudWatch

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance
• Paid holidays and Paid Time Off
• 401(k) plan with contributions
• Long-term/Short-term Disability
• Paid Parental Leave
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Additional role context

• Work-life balance support through wellbeing programs, regardless of working arrangement.
• This role notes strong hands-on experience with secure AI/LLM deployment patterns and cloud-native agent architectures as a plus.

These can help you stand out

• AWS certifications such as AWS Certified AI Practitioner, AWS Certified AI Engineer, or equivalent.
• Experience with multi-agent systems and advanced agent orchestration patterns.
• Experience using AI development accelerators such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude, or similar tools (at least one is required).
• Experience with conversational analytics, agent evaluation frameworks, and bot performance optimization.
• Experience with Responsible AI, AI governance, compliance, and enterprise AI security controls.

Compensation and eligibility

• Annual salary: $110,000 to $130,000 based on experience and qualifications.
• Eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, subject to plan terms.
• Visa transfer or sponsorship is not available now or in the future.