Associate Cloud Engineer Jobs in Maple Grove, MN

Location: Onsite (Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States)

Experience: 8+ years

Employment Type: Contract

Company Description

Abotts, an innovative IT solutions provider in Mangaluru, specializes in Library Archiving Software and Software Testing Services. As a Google Cloud Partner, we excel in Oracle, SAP, and Java technologies to bring excellence to every project. We are dedicated to architecting possibilities and guiding enterprises to IT success.

Position Summary

Shutterfly is seeking a Senior AI Engineer (Contractor) to accelerate the design, development, and deployment of enterprise AI capabilities across our business. This individual will partner closely with Enterprise Information Services, product teams, and business stakeholders to architect and ship production-grade generative and agentic AI solutions on a multi-cloud, multi-model stack. The ideal candidate is platform-agnostic, deeply hands-on, and comfortable taking ambiguous business problems from whiteboard to production.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy enterprise-grade AI agents, copilots, and automation workflows that integrate with Microsoft 365, internal systems, and customer-facing applications.
• Microsoft Copilot Studio: Develop and operationalize agents and low-code/pro-code solutions — custom topics, plugins, knowledge sources, and connectors.
• Azure AI Foundry: Architect and implement model orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation, and guardrails using model catalog, prompt flow, agent service, and content safety.
• Anthropic Claude: Integrate Claude models (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) via the Anthropic API and Bedrock — including prompt caching, tool use, extended thinking, and agentic patterns.
• Google Cloud Platform: Build and operate AI services using Vertex AI, Gemini, Agent Builder, BigQuery, and associated MLOps tooling.
• Lead end-to-end model lifecycle: data preparation, fine-tuning/adaptation, evaluation, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Establish and enforce responsible AI practices — security, privacy, content safety, bias mitigation, prompt injection defense, and auditability — in alignment with Shutterfly enterprise standards.
• Partner with Systems Engineering, Security, and Data teams to integrate AI workloads with identity (Entra ID), data platforms, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Mentor internal engineers and developers; produce reusable patterns, reference architectures, and documentation that elevate the team’s AI maturity.
• Evaluate emerging frameworks, foundation models, and agent platforms; recommend strategic direction.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software / ML engineering experience, with 2+ years building production generative AI or agentic systems.
• Expert-level proficiency in Microsoft Copilot Studio — agent design, topics, custom connectors, Power Platform integration, governance, and lifecycle management.
• Hands-on expertise with Azure AI Foundry (formerly Azure AI Studio) — model deployment, prompt flow, agent service, evaluations, and content safety.
• Production experience with Anthropic Claude — Anthropic SDK, prompt caching, tool use, MCP (Model Context Protocol), and multi-turn agent design.
• Strong working knowledge of Google Cloud Platform — Vertex AI, Gemini, Agent Builder, BigQuery, Cloud Run, and IAM.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one of TypeScript/Node.js or C#/.NET.
• Solid grounding in RAG architectures, vector databases (Azure AI Search, Pinecone, Vertex Vector Search), embeddings, and semantic retrieval.
• Experience with LLM evaluation frameworks, observability (LangSmith, Azure AI Foundry evaluations, custom telemetry), and A/B testing of AI systems.
• Experience integrating AI with Microsoft 365 (Graph API, Teams, SharePoint, Outlook) and enterprise identity (Entra ID / OAuth2).
• Strong understanding of responsible AI, data privacy (GDPR, CCPA), and enterprise security practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with OpenAI (Azure OpenAI, GPT-4o, o-series), AWS Bedrock, and open-weight models (Llama, Mistral).
• Familiarity with agent frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK).
• Experience with MLOps / LLMOps tooling — MLflow, Kubeflow, Weights & Biases, Vertex AI Pipelines.
• Background in e-commerce, retail, or consumer-facing applications; understanding of personalization, content generation, and creative workflows.
• Contributions to open source AI projects or published technical writing.
• Relevant certifications: Microsoft AI Engineer Associate, Google Professional ML Engineer, AWS ML Specialty.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, ML, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Note: This job description is intended to convey information essential to understanding the scope of the role and is not exhaustive. Duties may be altered as per business needs.