AI Engineering Lead: Build & Ship AI-Driven UX

SmartRecruiters, Inc.; South Jordan (UT); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage

401(k) match

Generous PTO

Tuition reimbursement

Yearly lifestyle stipend

Employee discounts

Job summary

Cricut is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Lead/Manager to lead a team building AI-powered features across our client-facing applications. You will shape the roadmap with Product and deliver production‑grade AI integrations.

This role blends technical leadership with hands-on engineering and business sense, partnering with PMs to turn vision into reliable, delightful experiences. In-office 4–5 days per week.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more of: Angular, Kotlin, Swift, C#, or Python.
• 2+ years as a technical lead or engineering manager, leading engineers to deliver customer-facing software.
• Proven experience integrating AI-based features into client-facing production software.
• Practical experience with AI/LLM APIs and SDKs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Stability AI, or open-source models), including prompts and tool calls.
• Solid understanding of production AI tradeoffs: latency, cost, reliability, evaluation, and safety.
• Strong business sense and partnering with Product to define features and measure outcomes.
• Experience designing and consuming REST APIs and integrating with backend services.
• Experience with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines.
• Observability: instrumentation with Datadog, Firebase, etc.
• Hands-on use of modern AI engineering tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot).

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers building AI-powered features into client applications.
• Partner with Product Management to define AI features and shape the product roadmap.
• Architect and deliver end-to-end AI integrations into client-facing software.
• Stay hands-on: write, review, and ship production code.
• Evaluate models, vendors, and APIs; advise build-vs-buy decisions.
• Establish evaluation metrics, guardrails, and user feedback loops for AI features.
• Ensure safe and trustworthy AI experiences with content safety and privacy considerations.
• Collaborate with UX on intuitive AI interactions and latency handling.
• Work with data/ML teams on training, fine-tuning, and data pipelines.
• Ship behind feature flags with telemetry-driven rollout and kill-switches.
• Own health of AI features via telemetry: adoption, latency, cost, defects.
• Mentor engineers, lead code reviews, and foster learning and experimentation.
• Stay current on AI landscape and drive practical improvements.

Skills

AI engineering leadership

Hands-on software development

Product partnerships

Code review & mentoring

Stakeholder communication

CI/CD & automated testing

System architecture

Telemetry & observability

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering or related field

Tools

Datadog

Firebase

Claude Code

Cursor

Copilot

OpenAI API

Anthropic API

Google Gemini

Stability AI

Job description

Cricut is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Lead/Manager to lead a team building AI-powered features across our client-facing applications. You will shape the roadmap with Product and deliver production‑grade AI integrations.

This role blends technical leadership with hands-on engineering and business sense, partnering with PMs to turn vision into reliable, delightful experiences. In-office 4–5 days per week.