Lead Platform Engineer, API & AI Services

Job Title: Lead Platform Engineer, API & AI Services

Job Type: Contract (W2)

Start Date: ASAP

Duration: 6 Months (with potential for extension)

Work Location: Boston, MA (onsite role)

Work Schedule/Hours: Monday-Friday, 8 hours per day (standard business hours)

Compensation: $72.33 to $80.00 per hour

Position Overview:

Our client is a global consulting and technology organization supporting cutting-edge AI and enterprise platform initiatives. This role will support an advanced AI legal tech platform that delivers enterprise-grade legal research, contract review, and intelligent document processing capabilities powered by large language models (LLMs).

The Lead Platform Engineer, API & AI Services will own and evolve a production-grade API gateway serving as the secure entry point for enterprise AI services. This role blends platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI systems architecture, with responsibility for ensuring reliability, scalability, and security across a multi-tenant environment. The ideal candidate will bring strong hands-on expertise in Python/FastAPI, AWS infrastructure, API security, and modern AI platform architecture, while also providing leadership to a small engineering pod.

Responsibilities:

• Own and operate a production multi-tenant API gateway supporting enterprise AI services.
• Design, maintain, and enhance CIAM, OIDC, and OAuth 2.0 authentication and authorization frameworks.
• Manage JWT validation, JWKS key management, tenant identity propagation, claim validation, and key rotation.
• Ensure platform reliability through fault isolation, rate limiting, circuit breaking, latency optimization, and graceful degradation strategies.
• Lead rolling deployments and production operations within AWS ECS Fargate environments.
• Manage AWS infrastructure components including ECS Fargate, Redis, RDS, and multi-region deployment strategies.
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) using Terraform and/or AWS CDK.
• Build and maintain observability frameworks including distributed tracing, usage monitoring, dashboards, and platform metrics.
• Lead and mentor a pod of 3-4 engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and technical leadership.
• Partner cross-functionally with AI engineering teams to support LLM-powered legal AI services, including contract analysis and document review systems.
• Contribute to platform architecture supporting RAG workflows, agentic systems, asynchronous job processing, and structured AI outputs.
• Help define enterprise AI integrations beyond REST APIs, including MCP servers, callable tools, and agent-to-agent interfaces.
• Collaborate with peer engineering teams to resolve cross-functional architecture and integration challenges.
• Drive best practices across production engineering, deployment discipline, security, and operational excellence.

Required Qualifications:

• High school diploma or GED required.
• 6-9+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure experience.
• Strong hands-on experience building and operating Python/FastAPI services in production environments handling external traffic.
• Deep AWS experience including ECS Fargate, cloud-native infrastructure, and production deployments.
• Experience implementing CIAM, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT validation, and enterprise authentication frameworks.
• Strong experience building and managing secure API gateways and distributed systems.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform or AWS CDK.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience with observability tooling, distributed tracing, and production monitoring.
• Strong leadership experience mentoring engineers and leading technical delivery efforts.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Experience designing or supporting LLM-powered applications and AI services.
• Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI workflows, and enterprise AI integrations.
• Experience with Redis, RDS, and multi-region AWS infrastructure.
• Experience building secure enterprise APIs for regulated or customer-facing platforms.
• Experience within legal technology, SaaS, or enterprise AI environments.
• Strong understanding of scalable platform architecture and API-first product design.