Lead, AI Engineering

About the role

The Lead AI Engineer will design, build, and ship generative AI systems and agentic solutions for Bain’s clients. You will contribute across the full development lifecycle — from early experimentation and prototyping through to production deployment — collaborating closely with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with growing influence on technical direction and an opportunity to begin mentoring more junior team members. You will have opportunities to work with major AI ecosystem partners through Bain’s partnerships, collaborating on real client deployments and helping shape how emerging capabilities are applied in enterprise settings.

About Bain AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS)

Bain’s AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS) team works with clients to design and deliver AI-powered solutions that create measurable business impact. You’ll operate in multidisciplinary teams alongside Bain consultants, other experts in product, design, architecture and engineering, and client stakeholders, translating ambiguous business problems into robust AI applications that can be piloted, scaled, and adopted.

The Impact You’ll Have

Bain works with clients on board-level and executive priorities, helping deliver step-change results across growth, productivity, and resilience. In that context, AI is rarely a point solution. The most meaningful outcomes come from building AI as part of an integrated system that combines technology with redesigned processes, operating model changes, and adoption at scale across the organization.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to the design, development, and deployment of end-to-end generative AI systems, including multi-agent workflows and production-grade AI applications.
• Build and iterate on multi-component AI pipelines, including: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning, embedding generation and optimization, hybrid retrieval strategies (vector, graph, keyword).
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Build and contribute to agentic systems, applying sound engineering principles around separation of concerns, memory architecture, and tool integration.
• Contribute across the full stack: model experimentation, evaluation design, and production system deployment.
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments with attention to observability and reliability.
• Support and help build GenAIOps processes for automated testing, regression evaluation, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Implement guardrails, fallbacks, red-teaming strategies, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows.
• Partner with global ethics teams to ensure alignment with Bain’s Responsible AI standards.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks covering: hallucination rate and factual consistency, relevance and precision/recall, latency, throughput, and system-level performance, cost tracking and efficiency.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, data science, ethics, and infrastructure teams to build robust, compliant AI systems.
• Contribute technical insights and communicate findings clearly to cross-functional stakeholders and, where relevant, clients.
• Share knowledge with peers and support a culture of technical learning around RAG, agents, prompt engineering, and AI safety.

What We’re Looking For (Qualifications)

• 3–5+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles with hands-on building responsibilities.
• Demonstrated experience shipping generative AI features or systems end-to-end, from prototyping through production.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical collaborators and stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, and data science teams; some experience supporting or informally mentoring peers is a plus.
• Solid prompt engineering and context engineering skills; familiarity with conversation design principles.
• Working knowledge of evaluation design, experimentation frameworks, and data labeling strategies for LLM applications.
• Experience with: RAG architectures (vector-based retrieval; exposure to hybrid or graph-based approaches is a plus), agentic patterns (tool use, routing, memory management; multi-agent systems experience is a plus), ReAct, RLAIF, and other HITL + feedback loops.
• AI-Specific Tools & Frameworks - Orchestration frameworks, Vector and graph databases and Model + API ecosystems.
• Strong background in system design, architecture, and production-grade deployment.
• Familiarity with cost and latency tradeoffs when working with LLM workloads.
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity environments with collaborative cross-functional teams.
• Eagerness to grow into a technical leadership role and support junior team members.
• Experience in client-facing consulting or enterprise transformation environments is a strong plus.

Working Model & Travel

This role requires a minimum of three days per week working together in person, either at a client location or at your Bain home office. Travel is required beyond your home office / primary working location. Frequency and destination vary by project needs.

U.S. Compensation Information

Bain & Company's comprehensive benefits and wellness program is designed to help employees achieve personal independence, protection and stability in the areas most important to you and your family. Bain pays 100% individual employee premiums for medical, dental and vision programs, offering one of the most comprehensive medical plans for employees without impacting your paycheck.

Generous paid time off, including parental leave, sick leave and paid holidays.

Fully vested 401(k) company contribution.

Paid Life and Long-Term Disability insurance.

Annual fitness reimbursements.