Senior AI Engineer Contract

Instrument is a digitally native design and technology company built to help brands unlock their full potential. Since 2005, our team of makers, thinkers, and storytellers has partnered with leading brands like Google, Nike, Uber, ŌURA, and Eventbrite to craft digital experiences that create impact and drive results.

Unlike traditional agencies, we don’t just design—we build. Our work lives at the intersection of taste and technology, powered by curiosity, thoughtful curation, and a commitment to delivering the most fitting solution for every brief. We bring this to life across three core offerings: Brand, Marketing, and Product.

As a member of our freelance network, you’ll collaborate with our teams to bring bold ideas to life—whether launching new brands, building digital products, or shaping experiences that move people. We welcome collaborators from all backgrounds and experiences who share our curiosity, creativity, and care for craft.

We believe great work comes from diverse perspectives and shared purpose. If you’re passionate about learning, experimenting, and making work that matters, we’d love to hear from you.

The Project: We are developing a highly complex, stateful, multi-agent simulation engine driven by generative AI. This is a greenfield project exploring new forms of non-linear, narrative-based user interaction at scale. Unlike typical stateless web apps, this system requires persistent "memory" for thousands of unique, evolving user sessions. We are building an architecture where multiple AI agents orchestrate complex logic, maintain long-term context, and react to user inputs in real-time.

The Role: You will serve as the Sr. AI Engineer, focusing on the core intelligence and agentic logic that drives the application. You will be responsible for designing the multi-agent architecture that manages our core interactive loops, dynamic scenario generation, and global system state aggregation. You will be the team’s primary authority on how we talk to large language models, ensuring that our agents are fast, reliable, and strictly scoped to their specific domains to minimize latency and hallucination.

This is a part-time contract role (20 hrs/week) from 4/13–5/29 , with a strong likelihood of extension through October at full-time hours.

What You'll Do

Agent Design & Orchestration: Build and manage the logic for complex multi-agent workflows. You will design the systems that handle user onboarding (profile generation), dynamic scenario creation, and real-time interactive simulation loops.

Context Engineering: Architect state management for the LLMs to prevent "context rot" and hallucination. You will strictly govern what each agent knows, structuring context dynamically to maximize token caching and minimize latency.

Advanced Prompting & Evals Infrastructure: Write, test, and version-control robust system instructions for standalone LLMs and multi-agent w