Lead AI Engineer

About the role

Our client seeks a Lead AI Engineer to guide IVR and conversational AI initiatives and to design scalable LLM and NLP solutions for high-volume customer interactions. The role will drive architecture, best practices, and innovation across voice AI systems while contributing as an individual contributor and mentoring a distributed team.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop AI-driven IVR and conversational systems using Python.
• Build NLP models for text classification and clustering to support intent detection and call routing.
• Perform data analysis using SQL on large-scale IVR and interaction datasets.
• Design and deploy LLM workflows, including prompt engineering, RAG, and evaluation for voice and chat use cases.
• Lead development of agentic AI workflows for multi-step customer interactions.
• Establish LLMOps best practices for monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Partner with IVR platform, speech engineering, and product teams.
• Mentor offshore and junior AI engineers.

Experience Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in AI and ML with pre-LLM era exposure.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Proven expertise in NLP, including text classification and clustering.
• Strong experience in data analysis using SQL.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, including prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
• Good to have: experience with agentic AI and multi-agent orchestration.
• Good to have: experience with LLMOps or MLOps in production environments.
• Good to have: familiarity with IVR platforms and speech technologies such as ASR, NLU, and TTS.

Tools and libraries

• NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, XGBoost, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers, NLTK, Sentence-Transformers
• LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI SDK, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI
• Oracle, MySQL, SQLAlchemy
• FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant
• MLflow, Weights & Biases, BentoML, Airflow

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits
• 401k with company matching
• Life insurance

Pay

$70.00 to $80.00/hr (w2)

Schedule

Hybrid 4/1 in Charlotte, NC