Fast API Engineer

Our Pharmaceutical client is actively seeking an API Engineer for their growing team based out of the greater Chicagoland are. This opportunity is 100% remote (must be able to support CST) SUMMARY 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 clou d 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. REQUIREMENTS 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.