AI/ML Engineer Team Lead

Vizient; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 118,000 - 206,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Incentive eligible

Benefits package

Job summary

Vizient is seeking an experienced AI Platform Architect in Chicago to lead design, deployment, and operation of enterprise AI solutions. You will integrate LLMs, agentic workflows, retrieval, and deterministic processing while guiding a team of engineers and collaborating with product, data, and platform teams.

You will stay hands-on with architecture, ensure production readiness, observability, and strong security, privacy, and governance across high-stakes data and regulated environments.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of relevant experience in complex software or AI systems.
• Technical leadership for production-grade AI projects.
• Experience designing and operating generative AI in enterprise environments.
• Proficiency in Python and modern API development (FastAPI).
• Expertise with large language models, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented workflows.
• Experience establishing evaluation strategies for nondeterministic AI systems.
• Strong understanding of probabilistic vs deterministic software boundaries.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture and production observability.
• Experience with Azure or comparable cloud AI platforms.
• Experience with Databricks, vector databases, embeddings, or semantic search.
• Experience handling sensitive, regulated data in AI decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, development, deployment, and operation of enterprise-grade AI solutions.
• Design solutions using LLMs, agentic workflows, retrieval, structured data, APIs, and deterministic processing.
• Translate complex workflows into modular, testable software components.
• Determine where AI inference, deterministic logic, or retrieval yields reliable outcomes.
• Establish evaluation strategies with tests, analytics, and monitoring.
• Develop observability capabilities for intermediate outputs and decision traces.
• Lead investigations into grounding issues, model performance, and costs.
• Evaluate tradeoffs across performance, security, and maintainability.
• Develop APIs and production components; contribute to code reviews.
• Implement security, privacy, and production-readiness practices for AI apps.
• Mentor engineers and improve AI engineering practices.
• Drive continuous improvement using metrics and real-world outcomes.

Skills

7+ years experience

Technical leadership

GenAI/ML design

Python

FastAPI

LLMs

Prompt engineering

Evaluation strategies

Deterministic vs probabilistic

Cloud-native architectures

Observability

Azure AI Foundry/Search

Databricks/Vector DBs

Regulated data handling

Education

Relevant degree

Tools

Azure

Azure AI Foundry

Azure AI Search

Databricks

Vector databases

Embeddings

Reranking

Job description

Excited to grow your career? We value our talented employees and instill an environment where you feel engaged, satisfied and able to contribute your unique skills and talents while living and working as your authentic self. We provide extensive opportunities for personal and professional development, building employee competence and organizational capability to fuel exceptional performance through an inclusive environment both now and in the future.

Our people make all the difference in our success.

Summary:

In this role, you will lead the technical design, development, deployment, and operation of enterprise-grade AI solutions for complex, knowledge-intensive workflows. You will combine generative AI, agentic workflows, retrieval, structured and unstructured data, deterministic processing, and human expertise to create accurate, secure, explainable, and reliable production applications. You will remain hands-on with architecture and implementation while leading engineers, establishing evaluation and observability practices, and partnering with domain experts, product leaders, architects, data teams, and platform teams to translate ambiguous business challenges into scalable technical solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the architecture, development, deployment, and operation of enterprise-grade AI and machine learning solutions.
• Design solutions that combine large language models, agentic workflows, retrieval, structured data, APIs, and deterministic processing.
• Translate complex expert workflows into modular, testable, and maintainable software components.
• Determine where AI inference, deterministic logic, retrieval, rules, or traditional data processing will produce the most reliable outcome.
• Establish evaluation strategies using representative test sets, expert-reviewed outcomes, regression testing, quality measurements, and stage-level analysis.
• Design observability capabilities that capture intermediate outputs, decision traces, evaluation results, performance measures, and failure modes.
• Lead investigations into grounding failures, hallucinations, retrieval quality, prompt behavior, model selection, orchestration, latency, accuracy, and cost.
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs across performance, maintainability, extensibility, security, reliability, supportability, and operating cost.
• Develop APIs, services, prototypes, and production components while contributing to design reviews, code reviews, and complex technical problem-solving.
• Implement security, privacy, auditability, monitoring, and production-readiness practices for AI-enabled applications.
• Partner with domain experts, product leaders, architects, data teams, and platform teams to convert specialized knowledge into scalable system behavior.
• Develop reusable AI capabilities, engineering patterns, evaluation frameworks, and platform components that support multiple solutions.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen team practices across AI engineering, software design, testing, observability, and production operations.
• Drive continuous improvement by incorporating production metrics, evaluation results, expert feedback, and real-world user outcomes.

Qualifications:

• Relevant degree preferred.
• 7 or more years of relevant experience required.
• Experience providing technical leadership for complex, production-grade software or AI systems required.
• Demonstrated experience personally designing, building, deploying, and operating generative AI or machine learning applications in enterprise production environments required.
• Strong experience with Python and modern API and service development, including FastAPI or comparable frameworks required.
• Experience with large language models, prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool or function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows required.
• Experience establishing evaluation strategies for nondeterministic AI systems, including test datasets, regression evaluation, grounding, quality measurement, and failure analysis required.
• Strong understanding of the appropriate boundaries between probabilistic AI behavior and deterministic software, rules, retrieval, and data processing required.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture, asynchronous processing, APIs, events or queues, persistence, monitoring, and production observability required.
• Experience addressing enterprise security, privacy, reliability, auditability, supportability, performance, and cost requirements required.
• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, or comparable cloud AI and semantic-retrieval technologies preferred.
• Experience with Databricks, vector databases, embeddings, reranking, semantic search, or enterprise knowledge-retrieval platforms preferred.
• Experience developing AI solutions involving sensitive, regulated, or high-consequence data and decisions preferred.
• Strong technical leadership, mentoring, communication, problem-solving, architecture, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Career Framework:

Professional - Lead Associate (P4)

Estimated Hiring Range:

At Vizient, we consider skills, experience, and organizational needs in our compensation approach. Geographic factors may adjust the range estimate and hires typically fall below the top range. Compensation decisions are tailored to individual circumstances. The current salary range for this role is $117,600.00 to $206,000.00.

This position is also incentive eligible.

Vizient has a comprehensive benefits plan! Please view our benefits here: http://www.vizientinc.com/about-us/careers