Python Engineer

About the Company

Motion Recruitment has partnered with a healthcare company and seeking a AI/Python API Engineer for a 3 month contract.

The AI/Python API Engineer is a core technical contributor whose primary expertise is building AI/LLM agentic features exposed via APIs in Python within an enterprise cloud environment. The role is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a FastAPI (Python) backend that integrates large language models and other AI capabilities into enterprise production-grade services running on AWS. The defining requirements for this position are deep, hands-on experience across the areas of: AI agents, API development, Python, enterprise cloud (AWS preferred), and day-to-day use of Claude Code. These are the essential competencies; remaining skills, frontend and security, are valuable but secondary. The engineer uses AI-assisted development tooling, Claude Code in particular, as a central part of their workflow to plan, write, review, and ship high-quality code quickly.

About the Role

The AI/Python API Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a FastAPI (Python) backend that integrates large language models and other AI capabilities into enterprise production-grade services running on AWS.

This position is a 3 months contract and is Hybrid in Chicago, IL.

This is Strictly a W2 Role. No CTC candidates will be entertained. Candidates who can work without requiring any visa sponsorship now are in the future will be considered.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement FastAPI endpoints and services that expose AI/LLM capabilities securely and performantly.
• Integrate and operationalize LLM/AI features — prompt engineering, model selection, guardrails, and output validation — into production workflows.
• Deploy and operate application infrastructure in an enterprise AWS environment, following infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Use Claude Code and AI-assisted tooling as a primary part of the development process to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.
• Establish and maintain automated testing, CI/CD, logging, and monitoring for reliable, on-time delivery.
• Participate in code reviews and uphold coding and API-design standards.
• Communicate progress, risks, and technical trade-offs to stakeholders in a timely, accurate manner.
• (Nice to have) Contribute to the React 19 / TypeScript frontend as needed.

Qualifications

• Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Substantial professional experience building production APIs in Python — typically 5–8 years of software engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience delivering AI/LLM-driven applications (prompting, RAG, tool use, output evaluation).
• Hands-on experience with FastAPI or a comparable modern Python API framework.
• Demonstrated enterprise cloud experience, AWS preferred, building and operating production workloads.
• Practical, demonstrable experience using Claude Code (or equivalent AI-assisted development tooling) in a professional workflow.
• Strong communication skills: verbal, written, and technical documentation.

Required Skills

• Possess deep, hands-on experience with the AWS Strands agent framework (or equivalent) building AI/LLM-driven agentic features: prompt design, tool/function design and calling, observability, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), streaming responses, token/cost management, guardrails, and evaluation of model outputs.
• Maintain expert-level proficiency in Python, including modern idioms, async programming, typing, and testing.
• Demonstrate strong API development skills: designing and building robust, performant APIs (FastAPI strongly preferred), including async request handling, Pydantic data modeling, authentication/authorization, versioning, rate limiting, observability, and OpenAPI contracts.
• Demonstrate substantial enterprise cloud experience, AWS preferred: building and operating production workloads with services such as Lambda, ECS/Fargate, API Gateway, S3, RDS, Secrets Manager, IAM, and CloudFormation/SAM, following infrastructure-as-code and cloud-governance practices.
• Demonstrate effective, day-to-day use of Claude Code and AI-assisted development workflows to plan, write, review, and refactor code responsibly, increasing throughput without sacrificing quality.
• Demonstrate critical problem-solving and debugging skills across AI, API, backend, and cloud concerns.
• Demonstrate clear and concise written and verbal communication, including the ability to document technical decisions for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrate the ability to prioritize and multi-task in a high-volume, rapidly paced environment.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with React 19 / TypeScript and modern frontend integration with backend APIs.
• Information security and/or security architecture experience: secure SDLC, threat modeling, IAM/least-privilege design, and secrets/data-protection practices.