AI-First Engineering Lead (Hands-On & Team Builder)

Rocket; Michigan; On-site; USD 123,500 - 276,000; Full time

Job summary

Rocket is a Detroit-based company delivering simple, fast, trusted digital solutions for complex transactions. We seek an Engineering Lead to steer an AI-first product with direct revenue impact and to shape the team and architecture.

You will lead hands-on engineering work while building a scalable, responsible AI-native platform. You will hire and mentor engineers, collaborate with product, design, data, and business partners, and set the technical direction for the product and platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software development experience
• 2+ years leading engineers as a manager or tech lead
• Experience designing and operating full‑stack systems on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google)

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers building agentic AI capabilities such as agent orchestration, tool calling, retrieval-augmented workflows, and LLM-powered features
• Stay hands-on: contribute to architecture, write and review code, and build critical components
• Own the technical strategy for the platform, balancing speed, scalability, maintainability, and business impact
• Set the standard for evaluation, observability, and guardrails for AI agents, ensuring reliability, safety, and measurable quality in production
• Hire, coach, and grow engineers, giving clear feedback and creating real growth paths
• Partner with product, design, data, and business stakeholders to set priorities and translate ambiguous business needs into a clear roadmap
• Define how the team works: engineering practices, AI-native development workflows, code review culture, and delivery cadence
• Lead collaboration across distributed engineering teams, including partners in India

Skills

Leadership

Software architecture

Hands-on coding

Cross-functional collaboration

AI/ML awareness

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Automated testing

Production operations

Job description

Rocket is a Detroit-based company delivering simple, fast, trusted digital solutions for complex transactions. We seek an Engineering Lead to steer an AI-first product with direct revenue impact and to shape the team and architecture.

You will lead hands-on engineering work while building a scalable, responsible AI-native platform. You will hire and mentor engineers, collaborate with product, design, data, and business partners, and set the technical direction for the product and platform.