Lead AI Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Lead AI Engineer based in the United States. This is a high-impact opportunity to help establish and scale enterprise AI capabilities within a fast-growing technology environment. You will design and deliver production-ready AI applications, agents, platforms, and reusable engineering patterns. The role combines hands-on engineering with the opportunity to shape AI standards, governance, experimentation, and development practices. You will help evolve traditional software development into an AI Development Lifecycle focused on continuous experimentation, evaluation, deployment, and improvement. Working across business and technical teams, you will turn emerging AI opportunities into solutions that improve efficiency, customer experiences, and measurable business outcomes. You will also mentor engineers and influence architecture, engineering standards, and responsible AI practices across the organization. The environment is collaborative, fast-paced, and designed for an experienced AI engineer who enjoys building while helping define what comes next. Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain production-grade AI-enabled applications, generative AI solutions, AI agents, tools, and enterprise workflows. Establish foundational AI Center of Excellence standards, reusable architectural patterns, engineering guardrails, and implementation practices. Contribute to an AI experimentation lab supporting rapid prototyping, evaluation, experimentation, and iterative development of emerging AI capabilities. Define and operationalize AI Development Lifecycle practices covering experimentation, evaluation, governance, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Build reusable AI platforms, services, APIs, orchestration frameworks, and service layers that can scale across enterprise use cases. Identify, prioritize, and deliver AI opportunities that generate measurable operational efficiencies, customer experience improvements, or revenue impact. Apply modern generative AI patterns including retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, agent orchestration, tool/function calling, embeddings, vector search, and human-in-the-loop workflows. Develop AI agents and integrate enterprise applications, APIs, tools, and data sources into reliable orchestration workflows. Work with large and small language models, embeddings, vector databases, model APIs, and leading AI ecosystems to select appropriate technologies for each use case. Design secure, observable, maintainable Python-based AI services using modern architecture patterns such as microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems. Establish evaluation frameworks, quality benchmarks, monitoring practices, feedback loops, and observability capabilities to continuously improve AI system performance. Implement responsible AI, data protection, compliance, governance, and human-oversight practices throughout the AI development lifecycle. Partner with business and technical stakeholders to translate problems and opportunities into scalable AI solutions, taking initiatives from concept through production and expansion. Create technical designs, reusable frameworks, documentation, and engineering standards that improve consistency and accelerate future AI development. Mentor engineers in AI engineering, AI-native development, experimentation, evaluation, and modern development practices. Requirements Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience. 8+ years of experience in cloud software engineering and/or AI engineering, including 8+ years of programming experience with Python. Hands-on experience building AI-enabled applications, generative AI solutions, AI agents, or production AI workflows. Strong experience with AWS and/or Azure and AI-native cloud services such as AWS Bedrock, AWS AgentCore, Azure AI Foundry, or Azure OpenAI. Deep u