Agentic AI Engineer Lead | Hybrid (Chicago or Houston)

Vekend, Llc; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

401(k) plan

Paid time off

Flexible work arrangements

Job summary

Vekend is seeking an Agentic AI Engineer Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership for enterprise-scale AI solutions. This hybrid role is based in Chicago or Houston, with 2–3 days in the office weekly, leading a team of AI engineers while remaining actively involved in architecture, coding, integration, and production deployment.

You will mentor engineers, guide implementation decisions, and ensure delivery excellence across architecture, data, platform, and business partnerships,

Qualifications

• Experience leading engineering teams while remaining hands-on in software development.
• Production-grade AI and ML solutions delivery experience.
• Agentic AI systems and AI-driven workflows knowledge.
• Deep understanding of AI/LLM architectures, model integration, and orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI engineering delivery and technical execution across multiple initiatives.
• Design, build, and deploy agentic AI workflows, intelligent agents, integrations, and supporting components.
• Serve as the technical lead for AI engineering teams, guiding implementation decisions and trade-offs.
• Translate architectural designs into scalable, production-ready solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices, coding standards, testing strategies, and quality controls.
• Actively contribute code and remain hands-on in development and troubleshooting.
• Partner with architecture, data, platform, and integration teams to ensure successful delivery.
• Remove blockers and drive issue resolution through the SDLC.
• Mentor engineers and foster technical growth and delivery excellence.
• Own technical delivery outcomes and ensure on-time, business-aligned projects.

Skills

AI leadership

Production AI

Agentic AI

Architectures

APIs

Testing & deployment

Communication

Tools

Python

Git

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

LLM integrations

Job description

Vekend is seeking an Agentic AI Engineer Lead to provide hands-on technical leadership for enterprise-scale AI solutions. This hybrid role is based in Chicago or Houston, with 2–3 days in the office weekly, leading a team of AI engineers while remaining actively involved in architecture, coding, integration, and production deployment.

You will mentor engineers, guide implementation decisions, and ensure delivery excellence across architecture, data, platform, and business partnerships,