Lead AI Engineer

Kforce has a client in Charlotte, NC that is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to lead IVR and Conversational AI initiatives, designing scalable LLM and NLP solutions for high-volume customer interactions. This role will drive architecture, best practices, and innovation across voice AI systems. Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and develop AI-driven IVR and conversational systems using Python
• Build NLP models for text classification and clustering to support intent detection and call routing
• Perform data analysis using SQL on large-scale IVR and interaction datasets
• Design and deploy LLM workflows (prompt engineering, RAG, evaluation) for voice and chat use cases
• Lead development of agentic AI workflows for multi-step customer interactions
• Establish LLMOps best practices, including monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management
• Partner with IVR platform, speech engineering, and product teams
• Mentor offshore and junior AI engineers
• 12+ years of experience in AI / ML
• Very strong proficiency in Python
• Proven expertise in NLP, including: Text classification; Clustering
• Strong experience in data analysis using SQL
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: Prompt engineering; Evaluation frameworks; Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

• Experience with Agentic AI and multi-agent orchestration
• Experience with LLMOps/MLOps in production environments
• Familiarity with IVR platforms and speech technologies (ASR, NLU, TTS)

* AWS/GCP

• Python/ML: NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, XGBoost
• NLP: spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers, NLTK, Sentence-Transformers
• LLM Frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI SDK
• Agentic AI (Good to Have): LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI
• Data & SQL: Oracle, MySQL, SQLAlchemy
• Vector Databases: FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant
• LLMOps/MLOps (Good to Have): MLflow, Weights & Biases, BentoML, Airflow