Experienced Senior Context Engineer, Digital Transformation & Innovation at BDO USA, Grand Rapids, MI

Experienced Senior Context Engineer, Digital Transformation & Innovation at BDO USA in Grand Rapids, MI. $110,000 to $140,000 a year. Apply with swipeandhired.

Job Summary:

The Experienced Senior Context Engineer is a senior hands-on software engineer who designs and builds the reusable context assets that power BDO Advantage’s AI-native product and process development. This role designs, writes, tests, reviews, and ships production code in C#/.NET and Python on the Advantage Azure platform and owns complex context and knowledge work—skill libraries, agent-instruction standards (CLAUDE.md and equivalents), prompt and context patterns, and retrieval-grounding corpora—establishing the conventions and quality standards that other engineers follow. The Experienced Senior Context Engineer works with a high degree of autonomy, provides technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, and partners closely with the AI Engineering Manager and product teams to ensure assurance domain knowledge is captured as high-quality, governed, agent-consumable context and delivered in working applications. The role reports to the Context Engineering Manager and operates within the Advantage SDLC, firm policies, and security standards.

Job Duties:

Application & Platform Engineering

• Designs, writes, tests, and ships production code in C#/.NET and/or Python that integrates governed context, retrieval, and agent capabilities into Advantage applications

• Owns the design of services, APIs, and tooling that load, validate, version, and serve context assets to agents and applications running on Azure Container Apps and Azure AI Foundry, including reliability, observability, and cost

• Sets and enforces engineering practice for the team’s Git-based workflows, pull-request review, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub), and uses agentic development tooling (Claude Code or equivalent) as part of daily delivery

• Reviews code and context contributions from other engineers for correctness, quality, security, and reuse

Context & Knowledge Engineering

• Designs and builds complex, reusable context assets—skill libraries, agent-instruction files (CLAUDE.md and equivalents), and prompt and context patterns—for use across DT&I products

• Serves as a senior technical resource on context-as-code practice, establishing conventions, inheritance, and versioning standards for the team

• Codifies BDO assurance domain knowledge (AKB) into structured, retrievable, governed knowledge with appropriate provenance and citation discipline

• Evaluates and pilots emerging context-engineering tools and frameworks to improve grounding quality and developer productivity

Retrieval & Grounding Engineering

• Designs and tunes retrieval pipelines (document parsing, chunking strategy, embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, metadata filtering) for accuracy, cost, and latency using Azure AI Search and vector stores

• Owns retrieval-corpus curation and lifecycle management including source selection, freshness, versioning, and retirement of stale knowledge

• Builds grounding evaluation, regression testing, and quality metrics for retrieval-augmented features

Context Quality, Evaluation & Enablement

• Defines and runs evaluation for context quality and grounding fidelity across products

• Contributes context scaffolding and standards for the Advantage Forge citizen-engineer program and product teams

• Mentors junior and mid-level engineers on software engineering and context-engineering practices and maintains team documentation

Risk Management

• Follows firm security, privacy, and compliance standards (SOC 2, PCAOB AS 2201, QC 1000, ISO 27001) when building application code and context assets

• Ensures sensitive or restricted data does not enter prompts, corpora, or model context, and maintains traceability of grounded knowledge

Performs other duties as assigned

• Willingly accepts share of less desirable assignments

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to engineering and development team members, as assigned

• Reviews and provides feedback on the work of other engineers, as assigned

Qualifications, Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

Education:

• High School Diploma/GED, required

• Bachelor’s degree with a focus in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Information Technology, preferred

Experience:

• Five (5) or more years of hands-on professional software development experience building, testing, and deploying production applications or services in C#/.NET or Python, required

• Three (3) or more years of experience building LLM-powered features – retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent tooling, or prompt and context systems – that reached production users, required

• Experience leading the design of at least one production service or application end to end, from requirements through deployment and operation in Microsoft Azure, required

• Experience defining reusable engineering assets, patterns, or technical standards adopted by other engineers, required

• Experience mentoring or providing technical guidance to other engineers, preferred

• Experience delivering AI or knowledge solutions in professional services, assurance, or accounting industries, preferred

License/Certifications:

• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate, or equivalent, preferred

Technology:

• Proficiency in C#/.NET or Python, including automated testing, dependency management, and performance debugging, required

• Strong knowledge of Git-based workflows, pull-request review, and CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions), required

• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Azure AI services including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Search, required

• Strong understanding of LLM context windows, prompting, retrieval, and grounding, and how each affects accuracy, cost, and reliability, required

• Experience with retrieval and vector technologies (embeddings, hybrid search, re-ranking, indexing), required

• Experience with agent-instruction and skill systems (CLAUDE.md and equivalents), agentic development tooling (Claude Code or equivalent), and Markdown-based knowledge structures, required

• Experience with Azure Container Apps, Semantic Kernel, and Dapr, preferred

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities:

• Ability to design, build, debug, and ship working software independently and to explain technical decisions clearly in a live, hands-on setting

• Deep knowledge of context engineering, retrieval design, and grounding for production LLM systems

• Ability to work independently on complex, ambiguous problems and provide technical guidance to others

• Ability to translate subject-matter expertise into machine-consumable knowledge

• Excellent problem-solving skills with a focus on accuracy, reliability, and grounding quality

• Strong communication skills with the ability to convey technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences

• Self-directed with the ability to manage multiple priorities and competing deadlines

• Collaborative mindset with the ability to build relationships across teams

• Ability to travel up to 10%, no relocation required

Individual salaries that are offered to a candidate are determined after consideration of numerous factors including but not limited to the candidate’s qualifications, experience, skills, and geography.

National Range: $110,000 - $140,000
Maryland Range: $110,000 - $140,000
NYC/Long Island/Westchester Range: $110,000 - $140,000