AI Automation Engineer

fairlife, LLC is a Chicago-based nutrition company producing nutrition-rich dairy products. The AI Automation Engineer will build and deploy AI agents and automated workflows that transform repetitive processes into reliable automation across manufacturing, supply chain, and business operations. The role also integrates agents with enterprise tools and data, implements responsible AI practices, and partners with cross-functional teams to improve operational decision-making.

What you'll do:

• Design, build, and deploy AI agents that autonomously reason, plan, and execute multi-step tasks to automate business workflows
• Identify manual, repetitive, and high-friction processes and re-engineer them as reliable, automated agentic workflows
• Orchestrate single- and multi-agent workflows using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen
• Integrate agents with internal tools, APIs, databases, and enterprise systems — including via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — to enable reliable, end-to-end task execution
• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines to ground agents in fairlife's domain-specific data
• Apply prompt engineering, tool and function calling, and rigorous evaluation to make agents accurate, reliable, and production-ready
• Leverage MLOps/LLMOps best practices to deploy, monitor, evaluate, and continuously improve agentic systems in production
• Build responsible-AI guardrails — safety, human-in-the-loop oversight, transparency, and compliance — into every automated system
• Partner with the Senior Data Scientist and cross-functional teams to identify and prioritize high-impact automation opportunities

What they're looking for:

• 0-2+ years of relevant experience in AI engineering, machine learning engineering, software engineering, or related fields
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, AI/Machine Learning, Engineering, or a related STEM field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Proficiency in Python and experience building applications with large language models (LLMs) and foundation models
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen) and orchestration patterns
• Experience with prompt engineering, tool and function calling (including the Model Context Protocol), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, ChromaDB)
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure/Fabric, AWS, or GCP) for scalable AI deployment
• Experience with MLOps/LLMOps practices and responsible AI principles, including monitoring, governance, and compliance
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including API development, version control (Git), and containerization (Docker)
• Strong communication skills for collaborating with business and technical teams
• 10%
• A bias toward automation: a track record of spotting repetitive, manual workflows and building tools or agents to eliminate them (preferred)
• Experience in manufacturing and supply chain (preferred)

Benefits:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, effective day one
• Supplemental health plans (hospital indemnity, accident, and critical illness insurance)
• Paid Time Off to recharge and support work-life balance
• Paid parental leave & adoption assistance (up to $10,000)
• Parental support & family care benefits, including childcare resources and lactation support
• 401(k) to support retirement planning with up to 9% in employer match
• Wellness reimbursement (up to $500 for qualified wellbeing expenses)
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for emotional wellbeing and work-life support
• Company-paid life insurance and short-term disability
• Employer HSA funding (for HDHP participants)