Lead/Principal Software Engineer - W2 Contract

Job Tittle : Lead/Principal Software Engineer

Location: Chicago preferred; Peoria also possible, IL –- Hybrid – 2 days/week onsiteContract: 12 months with possibility of extension/conversionInterview : VideoStart Date : October 12Over all Year of experience : 8–10+ years of professional software engineering experience with 2+ years of technical leadership (Please look for someone who has more than 3+ Yeas of US Work experience with multiple project)The ideal candidate should bring:

• 8–10+ years of professional software engineering experience with 2+ years of technical leadership
• Deep backend engineering experience, particularly Java, APIs, microservices, and distributed systems
• Strong software architecture experience across large-scale, production environments
• AWS/cloud-native architecture plus Docker and Kubernetes
• Hands-on experience building production-level GenAI/LLM applications and AI agents
• Agentic workflow/orchestration experience with tools such as LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or comparable frameworks
• Experience integrating foundation models such as Claude, GPT, or Gemini through APIs
• RAG architecture and practical vector database experience – Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma, pgvector, etc.
• Strong understanding of prompt engineering and production AI evaluation/testing, including hallucination/factuality monitoring
• AI coding assistant/developer productivity experience with tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, or similar
• Understanding of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and connecting agents with external systems/data
• Experience influencing multiple engineering teams, establishing architecture standards, conducting design/RFC reviews, and mentoring engineers
• Security-minded engineering experience around application/cloud security, AI governance, data sensitivity, and engineering standardsFor more info reach uday@mastekit.com