Lead AI Agent Architect (Remote)

Chai; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Leadership growth

Mentorship opportunities

Ownership of AI systems

Job summary

Chai is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to own the architecture, development, and deployment of AI agent systems across language, voice, vision, and automation. You’ll lead workflows that combine LLMs, APIs, multimodal models, and automation platforms.

This role blends hands-on coding with strategic direction, setting standards for reliability, safety, latency, and cost while mentoring engineers and collaborating with Product, Design, and Enablement teams.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering with focus on applied AI systems.
• Proven experience with LLMs and AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).
• Proven experience building production AI systems, not just prototypes.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience with APIs, microservices, and backend integrations.
• Strong understanding of system reliability, scalability, and observability.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex systems clearly.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable AI agent architectures using LLMs, tool calling, retrieval, memory, and orchestration frameworks.
• Own multi-step, multi-agent workflows for complex tasks and decision-making.
• Make architectural decisions around when to use LLMs vs. deterministic systems.
• Lead prompt strategy across models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, open-source models).
• Develop reusable prompt patterns, chains, and templates.
• Ensure prompts are optimized for reliability, safety, latency, and cost.
• Architect and build end-to-end AI workflows using tools like n8n, LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom orchestration layers.
• Integrate AI agents with backend systems (CRMs, databases, internal tools, third-party APIs).
• Implement robust error handling, retries, observability, and logging.
• Lead design of production-grade voice agents and conversational systems.
• Define best practices for spoken dialogue, intent handling, fallback strategies, and escalation paths.
• Ensure compliance, safety, and reliability in voice and conversational use cases.
• Optimize for low latency, natural language flow, and user trust.
• Design and deploy multimodal workflows combining vision, language, and automation.
• Apply vision models for object detection, quality control, or document understanding.
• Integrate vision outputs into downstream agent decision-making.
• Define evaluation frameworks for AI outputs (accuracy, hallucination risk, safety, bias).
• Build automated testing and QA pipelines for agent systems.
• Monitor performance in production and continuously improve systems.
• Set technical standards and best practices for AI development.
• Mentor interns and junior engineers on AI workflows and engineering rigor.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and Enablement teams to translate business needs into AI solutions.

Skills

Python programming

JavaScript/TypeScript

System reliability & observability

Communication skills

Applied AI systems

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

AutoGen

CrewAI

n8n

Zapier

Job description

Chai is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to own the architecture, development, and deployment of AI agent systems across language, voice, vision, and automation. You’ll lead workflows that combine LLMs, APIs, multimodal models, and automation platforms.

This role blends hands-on coding with strategic direction, setting standards for reliability, safety, latency, and cost while mentoring engineers and collaborating with Product, Design, and Enablement teams.