Senior AI Application Developer
Waukesha, Wisconsin
* Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States on a permanent basis. The Company is unable to provide employment visa sponsorship for this position now or in the future.
Build the AI Applications Shaping the Future of Manufacturing
Silgan is seeking a Senior AI Application Developer to help advance our enterprise AI transformation across a global manufacturing organization. This is a hands-on engineering role for an experienced developer who can design, build, deploy, and support production-grade AI applications that connect employees to the data, knowledge, and insights they need to make faster, better decisions.
You will work across intelligent knowledge retrieval, agentic workflow automation, enterprise system integration, and responsible AI governance. A working AI platform is already in pre-production, giving you the opportunity to expand and harden real capabilities from day one while helping build durable AI engineering expertise across the broader development team.
Why Join Silgan?
At Silgan, employees are part of a financially strong, global packaging leader supporting many of the world’s most recognized consumer brands. Our Business Technology team is investing meaningfully in AI, creating an opportunity to apply emerging technology to real operational challenges across production, supply chain, quality, finance, and other enterprise functions.
What We Offer
- Competitive compensation based on experience, skills, education, and market conditions
- Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and AD&D coverage
- Telemedicine access and supplemental employee benefit programs
- 401(k) with employer match after the eligibility period
- Generous paid time off plus company-paid holidays
- Tuition reimbursement and support for certifications and continuing education
- A collaborative environment with opportunities to influence Silgan’s evolving AI strategy
- The stability of a global, publicly traded organization with long-term career potential
What You’ll Do
As the Senior AI Application Developer, you will build and operationalize AI-powered applications while partnering with development, data, infrastructure, security, compliance, and business teams. You will help move AI capabilities from prototype through production with the controls, monitoring, and engineering discipline required in a complex enterprise environment.
Key Responsibilities
AI Application Development
- Architect and develop production-grade AI applications, including agentic systems, intelligent search, automated reporting, and operational decision-support tools
- Build AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning, tool use, function calling, and workflow execution across enterprise systems
- Develop retrieval-backed AI capabilities and RAG pipelines that connect structured data, documents, technical content, and operational knowledge
- Build hybrid solutions that combine deterministic data processing with AI-generated analysis, narrative, and anomaly detection
Enterprise Integration & Full-Stack Engineering
- Integrate AI capabilities with ERP platforms, data warehouses, production systems, and business applications using secure, reliable API and connector patterns
- Develop across a multi-language platform spanning Python, C#/.NET, and TypeScript and contribute across backend services, agent runtimes, and modern web interfaces
- Apply strong SQL and relational data skills to AI-driven analysis of large operational databases
- Design integrations with enterprise authentication and identity controls, including OAuth2/OIDC, JWT, Active Directory, and least-privilege access patterns
Responsible AI, LLMOps & Production Operations
- Design and enforce AI guardrails including access controls, output validation, prompt safety, data protection, hallucination mitigation, and human approval gates
- Implement LLMOps practices such as prompt versioning, model and quality evaluation, token and cost optimization, monitoring, structured logging, and regression testing
- Manage phased deployments from proof of concept through pilot and full organizational rollout with appropriate scope and access controls
- Partner with security, compliance, and legal stakeholders to support responsible, auditable AI deployments and contribute to Silgan’s AI governance framework
Team Capability & Collaboration
- Mentor and upskill developers on AI engineering concepts, frameworks, patterns, and modern AI-assisted development practices
- Evaluate emerging AI frameworks, model capabilities, orchestration patterns, and tooling and identify approaches that are genuinely useful for Silgan
- Translate complex AI concepts for business stakeholders and convert ambiguous business needs into clear technical requirements
What You Bring
The ideal candidate combines strong production software engineering experience with hands-on expertise building LLM-powered applications. You are comfortable working across the technology stack, understand where AI adds value and where deterministic approaches are more appropriate, and can build systems that are secure, reliable, maintainable, and auditable.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of professional software development experience with a track record of shipping production applications to real users at scale
- Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications and designing systems around model limitations and reliability considerations
- Experience designing and deploying AI agents using tool calls, function calling, or similar orchestration patterns in production environments
- Professional-level development skills in at least two of Python, C#/.NET, and TypeScript, with the ability to work across all three
- Strong SQL skills including relational data modeling, query analysis, stored procedures, and performance awareness
- Experience building retrieval-backed AI features such as search, RAG, or structured data catalogs and evaluating retrieval quality
- Experience integrating enterprise services through REST APIs and modern authentication patterns
- Working knowledge of cloud platforms; Azure experience is preferred, with AWS experience also relevant
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with AI orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework, LlamaIndex, or equivalent
- Experience developing Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers or clients
- Experience building end-to-end RAG pipelines, including chunking, embeddings, vector search, and retrieval evaluation
- Experience with modern web frontends and real-time or streaming AI interfaces using technologies such as React/Next.js, Blazor, Angular, SSE, SignalR, or WebSockets
- Experience implementing AI safety controls, output evaluation pipelines, and LLMOps monitoring or regression-testing practices
- Experience deploying and operating applications on Windows Server infrastructure and supporting CI/CD pipelines
- Experience in enterprise environments with formal security, compliance, change management, and audit requirements
- Manufacturing, supply chain, industrial operations, ERP, or process-intensive industry experience
- Experience mentoring developers or supporting cross-functional adoption of new AI/ML capabilities
- Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or similar tools
Why This Role Stands Out
This is an opportunity to join Silgan’s AI transformation at an early and meaningful stage. You will work on production applications tied to real manufacturing and business challenges, influence the technical patterns and governance practices that shape future AI adoption, and help establish internal capability that can scale across the organization.
The role combines hands-on engineering with enterprise visibility and the opportunity to help define how AI is responsibly applied across a stable, global manufacturing company.
Ready to Apply?
If you are an experienced software engineer who enjoys turning emerging AI capabilities into reliable, production-ready enterprise applications, apply today to learn more about joining Silgan Holdings and helping shape the future of AI in manufacturing.
