Lead, Engineering Excellence

About the role

We are proud to be consistently recognized as one of the world’s best places to work. Extraordinary teams are at the heart of our business strategy, requiring intentional focus on bringing together a broad set of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and skills in a supportive and inclusive work environment.

Bain’s Vector leads the firm’s software development efforts and defines engineering standards for Bain globally. You will solve cutting-edge problems for a variety of industries as a software engineer specializing in strategy for Engineering Transformations. As a member of a diverse engineering team, you will participate in the full software development life cycle and collaborate with product and engineering teams to build solutions for both consumer and enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

• Help clients improve AI-assisted or AI-led maturity across people, process, and technology
• Help developers improve productivity through adoption of AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.)
• Design, develop, and document AI applications aligned to business outcomes
• Develop prompt engineering strategies, implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and optimize model inference latency and cost
• Develop and champion modern software development best practices and concepts to technical and business stakeholders
• Participate in the full software development life cycle, including architecture design, documentation, unit/integration tests, issue resolution, clean code, and code reviews
• Provide technical guidance to external clients and internal stakeholders (80%):
  • Drive AI-led or AI-assisted transformation to improve productivity and quality across the product development life cycle (PDLC)
  • Explore new innovations in AI and software development to further improve productivity and modularity
  • Take an active role in ideation processes to bring innovative solutions to problems
  • Collaborate with clients’ technical teams to define technical approaches for implementing designed solutions, including new product architecture, data flows, integration strategies, and build processes
• Scope, architect, design, develop, build, and release robust and scalable applications (20%):
  • Translate business requirements into technical requirements and implementation details
  • Build complex systems that are extensible, easy to understand, and self-maintaining
  • Integrate with third-party systems to enable use cases that power business solutions
  • Work closely with product and design to create modern AI systems
  • Build end-to-end AI agent systems, including reasoning loops, planning mechanisms, and tool orchestration frameworks
  • Develop and optimize LLM-powered applications using advanced prompting, structured outputs, and model routing strategies
  • Design and implement multi-agent architectures (planner, executor, verifier, critic patterns)
  • Build scalable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines with optimized embedding and retrieval strategies

Requirements

• Bachelor’s in computer science or a related technical field; or equivalent work experience
• Experience in an engineering role at a start-up or fast-growing tech company, with a strong track record of increasing mastery and responsibility
• 5+ years of experience with full-stack development
• 2+ years of experience with micro-service API development (e.g., RESTful, GraphQL, gRPC) with frameworks (e.g., FastAPI, Swagger, OpenAPI)
• 1+ years of experience with AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.)
• Strong knowledge of development best practices (automated testing frameworks, CI/CD, etc.)
• Strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, automated testing, object-oriented programming, performance complexity, and implications of computer architecture on software performance
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and transformer architectures
• Strong knowledge of prompt engineering, structured prompting, and reasoning control techniques
• Experience designing and deploying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems
• Ability to evaluate model performance beyond accuracy (reasoning quality, hallucination rate, task success)
• Understanding of tokenization, context window limits, and cost optimization strategies
• Strong Python proficiency for AI development

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s in computer science or a related technical field
• 1+ years of experience in consulting
• 2+ years of experience with SQL or NoSQL databases
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or SQL Server
• Experience working on public cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and associated deep understanding of failover, high-availability, and high scalability
• Ability to explain and discuss technical concepts and methodologies with colleagues and clients from other disciplines

Schedule

• Hybrid model, requiring in-office presence at least 3 days per week, either at a client location or at your Bain home office
• Travel is required (~25%)

Pay

Compensation for this role includes base salary, annual discretionary performance bonus, 401(k) plan with an annual employer contribution based on years of service, and Bain’s best-in-class benefits package.

The estimated annualized full-time salary range for this role is:

• $179,875 in Atlanta, Boston, Texas, and Chicago
• $203,925 in California, New York, Washington, DC, and Washington State

Placement within these ranges will vary based on factors such as experience, education, training, and skill level. Compensation also includes a discretionary annual performance bonus, 401(k) plan with employer contribution, and benefits.

Benefits

• 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, which increases after 3 years of service and is 100% vested upon start date
• 100% individual employee premiums for medical, dental, and vision programs
• Generous paid time off, including parental leave, sick leave, and paid holidays
• Paid life and long-term disability insurance
• Annual fitness reimbursements