Role Overview
ICON is looking for a pragmatic builder who has made the leap from traditional software engineering into the emerging world of agentic AI development. As an AI Software Engineer at ICON, you will be responsible for designing and shipping AI-powered tools, workflows, and autonomous agents that accelerate ICON's construction technology platform. This role reports to the Sr. Director, Defense Technology Programs and is available for remote work with periodic travel to ICON HQ in Austin, TX as projects require.
Responsibilities
- Design and build agentic AI systems that automate complex, multi-step workflows across ICON's software platform
- Develop LLM-powered features and products using state-of-the-art foundation models and APIs (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI)
- Architect and implement multi-agent pipelines, tool-use systems, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations
- Build robust RAG systems including document ingestion, chunking strategies, embedding pipelines, and vector retrieval
- Collaborate with software and domain teams to identify high-leverage AI automation opportunities and translate them into shipped products
- Own the full development lifecycle of AI features: prototyping, evaluation, deployment, and iteration
- Serve as a technical resource and informal mentor on agentic AI best practices across the engineering organization
- Stay at the leading edge of the agentic AI landscape and bring emerging techniques into production
Minimum Qualifications
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong foundation in backend or full-stack development
- Demonstrated experience building and shipping production-grade products using LLMs and agentic frameworks
- Proficiency in TypeScript and/or Python
- Deep understanding of prompt engineering, context management, and LLM reasoning patterns
- Experience with tool-use, function calling, and agent orchestration (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Claude Code, or custom implementations)
- Ability to design and execute structured evals to measure and improve AI system performance
- Must be able to obtain and maintain security clearance
Preferred Skills and Experience
- Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) server development and integration
- Familiarity with vector databases (e.g. pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate)
- Experience with fine-tuning, RLHF, or model evaluation pipelines
- Background in ML fundamentals: embeddings, transformers, attention mechanisms
- Exposure to structured output generation and LLM-based data extraction
- Experience working with code generation agents (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Devin-style systems)
- Familiarity with AWS and serverless infrastructure for AI workloads
- Experience working in or alongside government, defense, or regulated environments