Work as a senior software engineer on a small team to develop, harden, and maintain artificial intelligence software tools and patterns for basic science and health research at a world-class research institution.
The incumbent will lead the curation of an ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and tools to be reviewed, hardened, and containerized for researchers to use in UCSF's secure environments in the Research Analysis Environment, the Facility for Advanced Compute, and the new UCSF CoreHPC environment.

The tools provided in this ecosystem will align where possible with Jupyter code sample libraries the team will provide for researchers to enable them to progress from learning and discovery into production-quality deployment of tools.

Although the incumbent's duties will initially focus on GenAI/LLM tooling, it will establish frameworks and strategies that would also support many other AI/ML tools. Providing standardized tooling now will significantly reduce friction for researchers to integrate technologies for trustworthy AI in the future as the pathway for that effort becomes clearer.

Examples of tooling to be developed into reusable patterns includes (but are not limited to):
- Templates for transformers and inference models (encoder/decoders such as BERT, Llama, etc)
- AI integration libraries (such as Langchain, LlamaIndex, AutoGPT, etc)
- Vector databases and adapters (ie ChromaDB for local discovery, Azure for cloud)
- Multi-agent and skills-based tools (ie Autogen)
- Language agent model and concept mapping strategies (ie AI tools for Neo4j)

One of the key outcomes of this work will be a set of building blocks which can be combined to produce production-ready products used by other teams, including an LLM- and RAG-based co-pilot for UCSF's research data assets and a chatbot testing platform with the capacity for integration against sensitive research data.

In addition to contributing to the engineering efforts in support of the above, this position will provide a key role in defining and implementing reproducible deployment mechanisms for these tools in our on-prem and hardened cloud infrastructure. The successful candidate will have background in creating CI/CD processes, planning and launching containerized software applications, and experience working with IT teams in a large organization to deploy complex applications.

The ideal candidate is passionate about open source software, creating well-documented standards and design patterns relied on by other data engineers. Additional responsibilities of the position may include assisting clients via complex AI solutioning requests and consults, implementation troubleshooting, communicating with key stakeholders via one-on-one training, documentation, requirements gathering, and other duties as assigned.

The final salary and offer components are subject to additional approvals based on UC policy.

Your placement within the salary range is dependent on a number of factors including your work experience and internal equity within this position classification at UCSF. For positions that are represented by a labor union, placement within the salary range will be guided by the rules in the collective bargaining agreement.

The salary range for this position is $138,100 - $207,100 (Annual Rate).

To learn more about the benefits of working at UCSF, including total compensation, please visit: https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/compensation-and-benefits/index.html