Junior AI Engineer

UniFirst Corporation is looking for an early-career Junior AI Engineer to help build, test, monitor, optimize, and document enterprise-grade AI solutions using Microsoft Azure AI Services. The role involves hands-on engineering and collaboration with various teams to develop intelligent applications and operational processes.

What you'll do:

• Set up and configure AI-powered services using Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Functions
• Develop and maintain automated test suites for AI systems, including prompt regression, retrieval-quality, response-quality, safety, and end-to-end integration tests
• Create reusable evaluation datasets, test cases, scorecards, and performance baselines for AI applications and components
• Set up and maintain monitoring for response quality, failures, latency, token usage, model cost, retrieval performance, and other operational metrics
• Run structured experiments across models, prompts, retrieval settings, and search parameters to maintain quality while reducing token usage, latency, and operating cost
• Configure and optimize Azure AI Search, including semantic ranker, hybrid retrieval, vector search, filters, scoring profiles, top-k settings, chunking strategies, and reranking approaches
• Evaluate alternative language, embedding, and reranking models using documented benchmarks and recommend appropriate options for defined use cases
• Create backend components and lightweight client-side tools that expose AI capabilities across business systems
• Research emerging AI engineering practices, tools, frameworks, and vendor guidance, and translate findings into actionable recommendations
• Partner with engineers and architects to document approved AI patterns, implementation guidance, troubleshooting procedures, and best practices in Confluence
• Maintain developer-focused versions of AI guidance as Cursor rules, repository instructions, templates, and reusable examples, keeping them synchronized with enterprise documentation
• Collaborate with AI engineers, enterprise architects, developers, infrastructure teams, and business partners to deliver secure, governed, and responsible AI solutions

What they're looking for:

• 0-2 years of relevant software development experience through professional work, internships, academic projects, or personal projects using Python, C#, JavaScript, or Java
• Experience or demonstrated familiarity with one or more Azure AI services, such as Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, or Azure Functions
• Familiarity with software testing concepts, including unit, integration, regression, and automated testing
• Ability to use metrics and structured evaluations to compare AI model, prompt, or retrieval performance
• Familiarity with application monitoring, logging, telemetry, dashboards, and operational troubleshooting
• Ability to analyze tradeoffs among response quality, reliability, latency, token usage, and cost
• Strong research, technical writing, collaboration, problem-solving, and communication skills
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience orchestrating RAG pipelines or combining structured and unstructured data in AI workflows
• Exposure to LLM evaluation frameworks, AI observability platforms, prompt testing tools, or custom evaluation pipelines
• Experience experimenting with multiple language models, embedding models, rerankers, prompts, or retrieval configurations
• Familiarity with Azure Data Lake, Blob Storage, document intelligence, or enterprise-scale datasets