Lead AI Engineer (New York)

Lead Software Engineer, AI Engineering

Location: New York City

Summary:

Join a collaborative team of engineers, product owners, and business partners building high-impact AI products across a large enterprise. As a Lead Software Engineer, you will drive the architecture, design, and delivery of production-grade AI agents and intelligent systems while helping incubate new AI solutions from concept to scale.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an experienced engineer who excels at solving complex problems, mentoring teams, and shaping AI engineering best practices. You will influence technical direction, develop reusable AI capabilities, and help accelerate AI adoption across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, deployment, and evolution of production AI systems and agent-based applications.
• Define technical direction and make architecture decisions across models, orchestration, retrieval, infrastructure, security, reliability, and cost.
• Drive AI initiatives from experimentation through production adoption and enterprise scale.
• Establish engineering standards for AI evaluation, testing, observability, guardrails, and responsible deployment.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and raise technical excellence across teams.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and guide adoption strategies.
• Build reusable AI platforms and capabilities that support multiple products and teams.
• Partner with business and technology stakeholders to identify opportunities where AI can improve workflows and create measurable impact.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python, Java, or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Proven experience designing and delivering AI-enabled applications in production environments.
• Expertise in modern AI engineering practices, including agent frameworks, tool/function calling, RAG, evaluation, observability, and safety controls.
• Experience building cloud-native solutions on AWS or similar platforms.
• Strong architecture, problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Preferred

• Experience defining engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Experience in large-scale enterprise or highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with financial services or other data-intensive industries.