Senior AI Engineer

At McCormick, we bring our passion for flavor to work each day. We encourage growth, respect everyone's contributions and do what's right for our business, our people, our communities and our planet. Join us on our quest to make every meal and moment better.

Founded in Baltimore, MD in 1889 in a room and a cellar by 25-year-old Willoughby McCormick with three employees, McCormick is a global leader in flavour. With over 14,000 employees around the world and more than $6 Billion in annual sales, the Company manufactures, markets, and distributes spices, seasoning mixes, condiments and other flavourful products to the entire food industry, retail outlets, food manufactures, food service businesses and consumers.

While our global headquarters are in the Baltimore, Maryland, USA area, McCormick operates and serves customers from nearly 60 locations in 25 countries and 170 markets in Asia-Pacific, China, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and the Americas, including North, South and Central America

Position Overview

The Senior AI Engineer is working as part of a cross-functional Agile product team responsible for building and scaling McCormick’s enterprise Agentic AI platform.

This role focuses on backend engineering and architecture for distributed, multi-agent AI systems built in Azure using LangChain, LangGraph, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication patterns. The engineer partners closely with AI engineers, data scientists, product managers, and platform architects to translate AI capabilities into secure, scalable, production-grade services.

Operating within an Agile framework, this role contributes to sprint delivery, technical design discussions, backlog refinement, and shared engineering accountability. The position plays a key role in shaping backend architecture and engineering standards while delivering incrementally as part of the team.

Key Responsibilities

• Contribute as a senior backend engineer within an Agile squad to design, build, and enhance core components of McCormick’s Agentic AI platform, participating fully in sprint ceremonies and shared delivery commitments. (35%)
• Collaborate with architects and engineers to design and implement scalable multi-agent orchestration patterns using LangChain, LangGraph, MCP, and A2A within Azure cloud-native architectures (AKS, Functions, Event Grid, Web Apps). (25%)
• Develop and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs (Python, FastAPI) supporting conversational AI, vector search, tool execution, and distributed workflows. (20%)
• Partner with DevOps and platform teams to implement CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring, and production readiness practices ensuring reliability and scalability of AI systems. (15%)
• Participate in code reviews, technical design discussions, and continuous improvement initiatives to elevate engineering standards within the Agile team. (5%)

Secondary Responsibilities

• Support Responsible AI, security, and governance standards in partnership with enterprise teams.
• Participate in an on-call support rotation for the AI platform, as operational needs evolve.
• Perform other responsibilities as assigned by the Supervisor.

Required Qualifications

Level of Education and Discipline

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or related technical discipline.

Certification and/or Licenses

Experience - functional/industry/commercial knowledge, business acumen

• Total years of experience required 8-10 (min)
• 7+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering within Agile software delivery environments.
• 3+ years of experience deploying AI/ML or LLM-powered systems into production environments.
• Strong experience designing distributed, cloud-native systems in Azure.

Interpersonal Skills - leadership, interactions, communication, influence

• Excellent communication skills and a desire to collaborate openly within a fast-moving team

Other Skills and HPO Competencies

• Strong Python engineering experience with FastAPI or similar backend frameworks.
• Experience with LangChain and LangGraph for agent orchestration.
• Practical understanding of MCP and A2A communication concepts within distributed AI systems.
• Experience with Azure services including AKS, Azure Functions, Event Grid, Web Apps, and Azure OpenAI.
• Experience integrating vector databases and semantic retrieval mechanisms.
• CI/CD implementation experience using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.
• Experience implementing observability and monitoring (Azure Application Insights or similar).
• Experience building RESTful APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with conversational AI system design patterns and production reliability concerns.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience - functional/industry/commercial knowledge, business acumen

• Experience working on multi-agent or autonomous AI systems within product teams.
• Exposure to enterprise AI governance and Responsible AI frameworks.
• Experience integrating AI services with enterprise platforms (e.g., SAP or other ERP systems).

Dimension

1. This role contributes to McCormick’s enterprise AI platform as part of a cross-functional product team delivering incremental value through Agile methodologies.
2. The position:

• Influences backend architectural patterns within the AI platform.
• Shares accountability for sprint commitments and platform reliability.
• Contributes to enterprise AI engineering standards in collaboration with architecture and cloud teams.
• Impacts scalability, security, and operational resilience of AI capabilities used across functions.

Work Environment

• Work Environment Designation: Office

At McCormick, we have over a 100-year legacy based on our “Power of People” principle. This principle fosters an unusually dedicated workforce requiring a culture of respect, recognition, inclusion and collaboration based on the highest ethical value