AI Engineer Lead

Capital Group; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 154,000 - 246,000; Full time

Job summary

Capital Group in Charlotte is seeking an AI Engineer Lead to partner with investment professionals and business partners, turning ambiguous problems into AI solutions and leading the end-to-end development of production generative AI applications, including copilots and knowledge-search experiences.

You will design, build, and operate retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, ensure security, governance, and cost awareness, and take ownership from discovery through production, with a focus on

Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Hands-on production experience building and shipping LLM-powered applications.
• Experience designing end-to-end RAG pipelines and integrating LLMs with real systems.
• Strong understanding of system design, APIs, and cloud-native development.
• Experience implementing security, privacy, and compliance controls in production systems.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business partners to understand workflows and translate needs into technical specs.
• Design, build, and operate production generative AI applications (copilots, assistants, knowledge-search experiences).
• Architect and implement end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation pipelines (parsing, ingestion, embeddings, storage, retrieval, prompts).
• Build agents and agentic workflows with auditable boundaries and guardrails.
• Practice eval-driven development with acceptance criteria, evaluation harnesses, and quality measurements.
• Take end-to-end ownership from discovery through production with observability and cost-tracking.

Skills

Python

LLM-powered apps

Prompt engineering

RAG pipelines

APIs

Distributed systems

Evaluation & testing

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Job description

“I can be myself at work.”

You are more than a job title. We want you to feel comfortable doing great work and bringing your best, authentic self to everything you do. We value your talents, traditions, and uniqueness—and we’re committed to fostering a strong sense of belonging in a respectful workplace.

“I can be myself at work.”

You are more than a job title. We want you to feel comfortable doing great work and bringing your best, authentic self to everything you do. We value your talents, traditions, and uniqueness—and we’re committed to fostering a strong sense of belonging in a respectful workplace.

We intentionally seek diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds, investing in a culture designed to celebrate differences. We believe that belonging leads to better outcomes and a stronger community of associates united by our mission. At Capital, we live our core values every day: Integrity, Client Focus, Diverse Perspectives, Long-Term Thinking, and Community.

“I can influence my income.”

You want to feel recognized at work. Your performance will be reviewed annually, and your compensation will be designed to motivate and reward the value that you provide. You’ll receive a competitive salary, bonuses and benefits. Your company-funded retirement contribution will factor in salary and variable pay, including bonuses.

“I can lead a full life.”

You bring unique goals and interests to your job and your life. Whether you’re raising a family, you’re passionate about where you volunteer, or you want to explore different career paths, we’ll give you the resources that can set you up for success.

• Enjoy generous time-away and health benefits from day one, with the opportunity for flexible work options
• Receive 2-for-1 matching gifts for your charitable contributions and the opportunity to secure annual grants for the organizations you love
• Access on-demand professional development resources that allow you to hone existing skills and learn new ones

“I can succeed as a AI Engineer Lead at Capital Group.”

As a AI Engineer Lead, you'll partner with investment professionals and business partners to turn ambiguous problems into working AI solutions that improve our investment process and business outcomes. You are the build-and-deploy bridge between the people who own the problem and the AI platform that powers the answer: you lead discovery, design the approach, write the code, and own it in production. This is a hands‑on engineering role for someone who is as comfortable in a working session with a business team as they are building a retrieval pipeline or hardening an agent. You will help set the standard for how generative AI gets built and operated responsibly at scale across the firm.

You will

• Partner directly with business partners to understand their workflows, scope the highest-value opportunities, and translate ambiguous needs into clear technical specifications.
• Design, build, and operate production generative AI applications — copilots, assistants, knowledge-search experiences, and agentic workflows — as reliable, production‑grade systems rather than demos.
• Architect and implement end-to-end retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines, including parsing, ingestion, chunking strategy, embeddings, vector storage, retrieval, and prompt management.
• Build agents and agentic workflows that plan and execute multi‑step tasks within explicit, auditable boundaries, with guardrails that keep behavior safe and predictable.
• Practice eval‑driven development: define acceptance criteria up front, build evaluation harnesses, and measure correctness, latency, and hallucination so quality is verifiable and regressions are caught before production.
• Take end‑to‑end ownership from discovery and design through build, rollout, and operational excellence — instrumenting systems with the observability, cost tracking, and audit trails needed to know when they degrade.
• Apply FinOps and cost‑optimization practices to AI workloads, tracking and managing token, inference, and infrastructure spend so solutions stay cost‑effective as they scale.
• Integrate AI solutions with enterprise data systems, APIs, and MLOps/LLMOps tooling, applying sound system design and distributed‑systems judgment.
• Apply responsible‑AI judgment proportionate to the risk of each use case, working with risk and compliance partners to build the controls, human‑oversight patterns, and audit trails that let the firm move quickly and safely.
• Embed security, privacy, and compliance controls into the systems you build — including identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and audit logging — partnering with InfoSec and data‑governance teams to meet regulatory and internal‑policy requirements such as SOC 2 and applicable data‑privacy regulations.
• Codify what works into reusable tools, patterns, and playbooks, and feed insights back to platform, product, and engineering partners so the whole organization gets faster.
• Produce clear documentation, runbooks, and architectural diagrams so the systems you build can be understood, operated, and extended by others.

“I am the person Capital Group is looking for.”

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong proficiency in Python (or a comparable modern language).
• Hands‑on production experience building and shipping LLM‑powered applications, including advanced prompt engineering, retrieval, agent development, and evaluation.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building end‑to‑end RAG pipelines and integrating LLM solutions with real systems.
• Strong understanding of system design, APIs, distributed‑systems concepts, and cloud‑native development, with a track record of owning production systems on solid architectural foundations.
• A disciplined approach to evaluation and testing for non‑deterministic systems — you build evals and guardrails as a first‑class part of the work, not an afterthought.
• Strong communication skills: you can lead technical discovery, write clearly, and convey technical concepts to mixed audiences while keeping a low ego and a collaborative approach.
• High agency and comfort navigating the ambiguity of a large, regulated organization, with the judgment to make trade‑offs between scope, speed, and quality.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience implementing security, privacy, and compliance controls in production systems — for example IAM, encryption, audit logging, and data‑governance practices, ideally in a regulated environment.

“I Can Learn More About Capital Group.”

At Capital Group, the success of the people who invest with us depends on the people in whom we invest. That’s why we offer a culture, compensation and opportunities that empower our associates to build successful and prosperous careers. Through nine decades, our goal has been to improve people’s lives through successful investing. We know that our history is a testament to the strength of the people we hire. More than 9,000 associates in 30+ offices around the world help our clients and each other grow and thrive every day.

Charlotte Base Salary Range: $153,842-$246,147

Southern California Base Salary Range: $179,273-$286,837

In addition to a highly competitive base salary, per plan guidelines, restrictions and vesting requirements, you also will be eligible for an individual annual performance bonus, plus Capital’s annual profitability bonus plus a retirement plan where Capital contributes 15% of your eligible earnings.

You can learn more about our compensation and benefits.

• Temporary positions in the United States are excluded from the above mentioned compensation and benefit plans.

We are an equal opportunity employer, which means we comply with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit discrimination when making all decisions about employment. As equal opportunity employers, our policies prohibit unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex (including gender and gender identity), pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship status, AIDS/HIV status, political activities or affiliations, military or veteran status, status as a victim of domestic violence, assault or stalking or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.