Lead AI Engineer

Remote (United States)

Job Details

Job Type: Full-Time

Salary: $200,000 - $220,000 per year

About the Role

This opportunity is for a Lead AI Engineer who will serve as a senior technical authority for 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. The Lead AI Engineer will provide 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.

What You'll Do

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.