Lead AI Engineer

Eliassen Group; Charlotte (NC); Hybrid; Confidential; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

401k with company matching

Life insurance

Job summary

Eliassen Group in Charlotte, NC is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to guide IVR and conversational AI initiatives and design scalable LLM and NLP solutions for high-volume customer interactions. The role will drive architecture, best practices, and innovation across voice AI systems while mentoring a distributed team. This is a contract-to-hire opportunity.

Rate: $70.00 to $80.00/hr. w2; conversion to FTE after the contract with benefits package including Medical, Dental, Vision, 401k matching and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of AI/ML experience with pre-LLM exposure.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Proven NLP expertise including text classification and clustering.
• Data analysis experience using SQL.
• Hands-on with LLMs, including prompt engineering and evaluation frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop AI-driven IVR and conversational systems using Python.
• Build NLP models for intent detection and call routing.
• Perform data analysis on large IVR datasets using SQL.
• Design and deploy LLM workflows, including prompt engineering and RAG.

Skills

Python

NLP

SQL

LLMs

Prompt engineering

LLMOps

Multi-agent orchestration

Tools

NumPy

Pandas

scikit-learn

XGBoost

Hugging Face Transformers

LangChain

Job description

Hybrid 4/1 in Charlotte, NC

Our client seeks a Lead AI Engineer to guide IVR and conversational AI initiatives and to design scalable LLM and NLP solutions for high-volume customer interactions. The role will drive architecture, best practices, and innovation across voice AI systems while contributing as an individual contributor and mentoring a distributed team.

This is a contract to hire opportunity. Applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis and convert to FTE following contract duration. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance.

Rate: $70.00 to $80.00/hr. w2

Responsibilities:

• Architect and develop AI-driven IVR and conversational systems using Python.
• Build NLP models for text classification and clustering to support intent detection and call routing.
• Perform data analysis using SQL on large-scale IVR and interaction datasets.
• Design and deploy LLM workflows, including prompt engineering, RAG, and evaluation for voice and chat use cases.
• Lead development of agentic AI workflows for multi-step customer interactions.
• Establish LLMOps best practices for monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Partner with IVR platform, speech engineering, and product teams.
• Mentor offshore and junior AI engineers.

Experience Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in AI and ML with pre-LLM era exposure.
• Strong proficiency in Python.
• Proven expertise in NLP, including text classification and clustering.
• Strong experience in data analysis using SQL.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, including prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
• Good to have: experience with agentic AI and multi-agent orchestration.
• Good to have: experience with LLMOps or MLOps in production environments.
• Good to have: familiarity with IVR platforms and speech technologies such as ASR, NLU, and TTS.
• Tools and libraries: NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, XGBoost, spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers, NLTK, Sentence-Transformers, LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI SDK, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, Oracle, MySQL, SQLAlchemy, FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, MLflow, Weights & Biases, BentoML, Airflow.