AI Engineer - $96.15 - $105.77 per hour

About the Role

This opportunity is for a senior technical authority who will shape artificial intelligence strategy, architecture, and adoption across a customer-facing digital platform. The role combines hands-on AI engineering with organization-wide technical leadership, including decisions around AI architecture, platform selection, development standards, tooling, and system evolution. This is a systems leadership role rather than a people management position, providing technical direction without carrying direct reports as a primary responsibility. The position requires close collaboration with engineering, product, and business leadership while maintaining ownership of critical technical decisions involving AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Direction
  • Define the AI engineering roadmap and establish architecture standards across the organization.
  • Lead build-versus-buy-versus-integrate decisions for AI systems and platforms and clearly document the reasoning behind those decisions.
  • Evaluate emerging AI tools, frameworks, and models and provide clear, well-supported technical recommendations to leadership.
  • Serve as the primary technical escalation point for complex AI and machine learning system design challenges.
• Enterprise Systems & Scaling
  • Architect AI solutions for an established enterprise platform, focusing on thoughtful evolution and integration rather than ground-up reconstruction.
  • Design production AI systems for scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
  • Establish LLMOps practices, including evaluation and regression suites for LLM-powered features, cost and quality observability, version-controlled prompts and configurations, staged rollouts, rollback processes, and production guardrails.
  • Ensure AI systems integrate effectively with existing product and engineering infrastructure.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to align AI capabilities with business outcomes.
  • Work with operational support to initiate and coordinate cross-functional engagement while maintaining a primary focus on technical leadership and decision-making.
  • Provide clear technical guidance on resource allocation, including ownership, required contributors, and the appropriate sequence of engagement.
  • Translate complex technical concepts into clear language for non-technical audiences, including executives and business stakeholders.
  • Constructively challenge technical direction and push back on approaches that could compromise long-term system health.
• AI Coding & Process Transformation
  • Champion and introduce AI-assisted coding practices and developer tooling across the engineering organization.
  • Define standards for responsible AI development, including guardrails, evaluation frameworks, and security considerations.
  • Drive continuous improvement in the processes and engineering practices used to build and deliver AI-powered features.

Qualifications

• Required
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated expertise designing and delivering production systems where correctness, reliability, and auditability are critical.
  • 2+ years of experience building production LLM, generative AI, and agentic systems.
  • Strong proficiency with AI-assisted coding tools and the technical judgment to establish organization-wide standards, evaluations, and guardrails for AI-generated code.
  • Sound judgment regarding appropriate AI use cases, including the ability to use probabilistic agents for customer-facing and research tasks while keeping policy binding, money movement, and compliance workflows deterministic, auditable, and subject to human governance.
  • Experience making and communicating build-versus-buy-versus-integrate decisions at the organizational level.
  • Strong Python proficiency and experience with the modern generative AI application stack.
  • Experience with agent and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent technologies.
  • Experience with model-provider SDKs, vector databases, and AI evaluation tooling.
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to create clear architecture decision records and present technical decisions to board-level audiences.
• Preferred
  • Experience working as a technical lead or principal engineer with broad organizational influence.
  • Experience working closely with product engineering teams in a dual-track agile environment.
  • Familiarity with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, vector databases, and semantic search at scale.
  • Experience with AI cost management, observability, and governance frameworks.

Role Structure

This is a technical systems leadership position and not primarily a people management role. Direct reports are not a standard responsibility of the position. The Lead AI Engineer may provide technical direction to individual contributors, but direct people management is expected to be the exception rather than the primary responsibility.

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision plans.
• Four weeks of paid time off.
• 10 paid company holidays plus two floating holidays.
• 401(k) program with employer match.
• Personal assistance programs designed to support a healthy personal and professional life.