AI Developer

About Salvo Software Salvo Software is a global technology company specializing in custom software development and advanced engineering solutions. With distributed teams across the US, LATAM, and India, we partner with clients to build high-performance, scalable systems that solve complex technical challenges. Our culture values innovation, ownership, and engineering excellence. We're growing our AI department and are looking for a hands-on AI Developer to help build it. Role Overview We are looking for an AI Developer to join and strengthen our AI department. Your core work will be building and operating LLM-powered systems: serving open-source models with Ollama and llama.cpp, building RAG pipelines, and developing MCP integrations that connect large languange models to real tools and data. Solid DevOps fundamentals - Docker, CI/CD, Azure - support this work, but AI engineering is the heart of the role. You don't need to be a deep ML researcher. What matters is production-grade Python, strong fundamentals, and the aptitude to learn fast. You'll work closely with our engineering and product teams to take LLM-powered features from prototype to reliably deployed systems, with mentorship available as you ramp up in areas like RAG architecture, Kafka, and advanced MCP work. Key Responsibilities AI / LLM Engineering (core focus) Serve and operate open-source LLMs using Ollama and llama.cpp, locally and in on-prem environments. Build and maintain RAG pipelines: embeddings, vector databases, chunking strategies, and retrieval quality. Develop MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations connecting LLMs to internal tools and data sources. Build backend services in Python that power ML inference and AI-driven product features. Parse and process structured and semi-structured data (XML/XSD, Office document formats) as pipeline inputs. Grow into model optimization over time: quantization (GGUF), GPU/CUDA tuning, and offline/air-gapped deployments. DevOps & Infrastructure (supporting) Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for AI services (Azure DevOps preferred; GitHub Actions / GitLab CI also used). Deploy AI workloads to Microsoft Azure,AWS and containerize services with Docker. Automate operational tasks with Python, Bash and/or PowerShell scripting. Troubleshoot across the stack - dig into root causes rather than patching symptoms. Support event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka (producers/consumers). Requirements Required Production-level Python - real services and pipelines, not just scripts. Hands-on experience serving LLMs with Ollama and/or llama.cpp. 3–5 years of hands-on experience across backend, ML engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure. Working knowledge of Docker and Linux fundamentals. Experience with Microsoft Azure, AWS and cloud-based deployments. Practical experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps strongly preferred; GitHub Actions / GitLab CI also relevant). Comfortable scripting in…