Lead AI Engineer

Strategic Staffing Solutions; United States; Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 276,000; Full time

Job summary

Strategic Staffing Solutions seeks a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise AI solutions in a hybrid St. Louis, MO environment. You will advance the platform from RAG apps to agentic AI systems with reasoning, orchestration, and tool use.

You will partner with platform engineers and stakeholders to ensure production systems are evaluable, observable, and reliable, delivering measurable business value.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• ],
• job_responsibilities_description [

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions.
• Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines.
• Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures.
• Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability.
• Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities.
• Develop automated testing and regression validation processes.
• Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise apps, and data sources.
• Design reusable AI patterns, frameworks, and components for scalability.
• Establish engineering best practices and participate in code reviews.
• Research and adopt emerging AI technologies with business value.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business problems into AI solutions.

Skills

Python

Production AI

RAG

Agent orchestration

AWS in production

REST APIs

Git & CI/CD

Agile teams

Observability & tracing

Databricks

LangGraph or similar

Security & best practices

Tools

Databricks

LangGraph

AWS

OpenTelemetry/Grafana/MLflow tooling

Job description

Job Description

Lead AI Engineer

Location: St. Louis. MO (Hybrid)

Duration: 12 Month Contract

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise AI solutions. You will help evolve our platform from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications to agentic AI systems that leverage reasoning, orchestration, tool use, and autonomous workflows.

You will work closely with platform engineers, architects, and business stakeholders to build scalable, reliable, and measurable AI solutions. A key part of the role is ensuring AI systems can be evaluated, monitored, and operated successfully in production.

What You Will Do

• Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions.
• Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines.
• Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures.
• Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability.
• Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities.
• Develop automated testing and regression validation processes.
• Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise applications, and data sources. Design reusable AI patterns, frameworks, and components that increase platform scalability and team productivity.
• Establish engineering best practices and contribute to code reviews.
• Research and adopt emerging AI technologies where they provide business value.
• Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into AI solutions

Required Skills:

• 5 years of software engineering experience.
• Proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade production software.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience building, deploying, and operating production AI systems.
• Experience designing and implementing RAG solutions.
• Experience with Databricks.
• Hands-on experience with LangGraph or similar agent orchestration frameworks.
• Experience building AI workflows that leverage tools, APIs, and external systems.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks and quality measurement.
• Experience implementing AI observability and tracing solutions.
• Understanding of agent architecture patterns, prompt engineering, and LLM evaluation techniques.
• Experience with AWS in production environments.
• Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.
• Knowledge of secure coding principles and responsible AI practices.
• Experience collaborating within Agile software development teams

Nice to Have:

• Experience with AgentBricks.
• Experience with Microsoft Copilot extensibility and agent development.
• Experience with LangChain and related frameworks.
• Experience with MCP integrations.
• Experience with vector databases and semantic search.
• Experience with AWS Bedrock.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, LangSmith, Grafana, MLflow, DeepEval, or similar tooling.
• Experience deploying multi-agent systems.
• Experience with Terraform.
• AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, or AI-related certifications.

Mindset:

• Delivers AI solutions that create measurable business value.
• Treats evaluation and observability as first-class engineering disciplines.
• Balances innovation with reliability, scalability, and governance.
• Takes ownership of production systems and outcomes.
• Thinks holistically about data, architecture, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborates effectively across technical and business teams.
• Continuously learns and adapts to evolving AI technologies.