Generative AI Engineering Lead

Bain & Company; Lisboa; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Bain & Company’s AIS team seeks a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the technical delivery of generative AI transformations for client engagements. You will own end-to-end workstreams, architect comprehensive AI pipelines, and guide junior engineers in a fast-paced, enterprise setting.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, data science, ethics, and infrastructure teams to deliver compliant AI systems, while mentoring peers and driving architectural decisions across programs.

Qualifications

• 6 -11+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles.
• Demonstrated experience shipping generative AI features or systems end-to-end, with ownership of one or more full workstreams.
• Emerging leadership presence: guiding peers, coordinating workstreams, driving technical decisions.
• Strong communication skills — able to explain complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical collaborators and client stakeholders.
• Solid prompt engineering and context engineering skills; familiarity with conversation design principles.
• Solid experience with RAG architectures (vector-based retrieval; hybrid or graph-based approaches a plus).
• Experience with agentic patterns (tool use, routing, memory management; multi-agent systems a plus).
• ReAct, RLAIF, and other HITL + feedback loop methodologies.
• Solid background in system design, architecture, and production-grade deployment.
• Familiarity with cost and latency tradeoffs when working with LLM workloads.
• Experience in client-facing consulting or enterprise transformation environments is a strong plus.
• This role requires a minimum of three days per week working together in person, either at a client location or at your Bain home office.
• Travel is required beyond your home office / primary working location.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, development, and deployment of generative AI systems and multi-agent workflows within client engagements, taking end-to-end accountability for assigned workstreams.
• Architect and build multi-component AI pipelines, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, embedding generation, and hybrid retrieval strategies.
• Implement and integrate reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Build and lead delivery of agentic systems with scalable tool integration and robust memory architecture.
• Drive workstreams from research through production deployment with quality and pace.
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments with observability.
• Establish and improve GenAIOps processes for automated testing, regression evaluation, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Balance performance, safety, responsible AI principles, and cost across system design; implement guardrails and HITL workflows.

Skills

Strong communication

Leadership presence

Prompt engineering

Team collaboration

Client-facing

Job description

Bain & Company’s AIS team seeks a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the technical delivery of generative AI transformations for client engagements. You will own end-to-end workstreams, architect comprehensive AI pipelines, and guide junior engineers in a fast-paced, enterprise setting.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, data science, ethics, and infrastructure teams to deliver compliant AI systems, while mentoring peers and driving architectural decisions across programs.