Large Language Model (LLM) Engineer Job Description Template

The large language model engineer builds systems on top of language models, covering prompting, retrieval, fine tuning, evaluation and the engineering around cost, latency and reliability. The distinguishing skill is evaluation, since these systems fail in ways that are easy to miss without deliberate testing and a demonstration that works is very weak evidence that a system works.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and build applications using large language models
• Develop retrieval augmented generation pipelines including chunking and embedding strategy
• Build evaluation suites that catch regressions and failure modes
• Fine tune models where prompting is insufficient
• Optimize cost and latency through caching, routing and model selection
• Implement guardrails and output validation
• Monitor production quality, cost and latency
• Investigate hallucination and grounding failures
• Design prompt management and versioning
• Keep pace with model capability changes and reassess architecture accordingly

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in computer science or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 2+ years building production systems with large language models
• Strong Python and software engineering practice
• Experience with retrieval augmented generation and vector databases
• Rigorous approach to evaluation beyond manual inspection
• Understanding of fine tuning approaches and when they are justified
• Cost and latency awareness in system design
• Experience implementing guardrails and validation
• Realism about model reliability

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with agent architectures and tool use
• Familiarity with model serving and quantisation