Lead AI Engineer for Enterprise Banking AI Solutions

williamblair; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

William Blair is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a newly formed AI Innovation Function within the Investment Banking AI & Technology team. You will embed with deal teams, design end-to-end AI-powered workflows, and set engineering standards for the team, spanning data pipelines, ML models, LLM orchestration, and Salesforce integrations.

You will build AI agents for high-value use cases and work with cross-functional bankers to translate ideas into production-grade solutions, emphasizing

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong full-stack foundation.
• Hands-on experience building applications or agents using large language models: prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-step orchestration, tool use, and evaluation frameworks.
• Experience deploying and operating multi-agent ecosystems in production - including reliability engineering, monitoring, failure recovery, and scaling agent infrastructure for enterprise workloads.
• Strong ML fundamentals-ability to train, evaluate, and deploy models, perform exploratory data analysis, and build feature pipelines.
• Rigorous engineering practices: you write tested, reviewed, well-documented code and build systems designed for maintainability, not just demos.
• Familiarity with capital markets, and preferably direct experience in or adjacent to investment banking, private equity, venture capital, or hedge funds.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred), data platforms (Databricks/Spark), and orchestration tools (Dagster, Airflow, or equivalent).
• Outcome orientation-you measure success by business impact delivered, not features shipped.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the integration layer between Enterprise Claude, Salesforce CRM, and our proprietary ML models, creating the orchestration backbone for AI-powered banking workflows.
• Develop AI agents and multi-step LLM applications for high-value use cases: CIP first-draft generation, buyer landscape analysis, intelligent process letter drafting, and deal status automation.
• Set engineering standards for the Innovation Team: code review practices, CI/CD pipelines, testing frameworks, and documentation norms that enable speed without sacrificing reliability.
• Work directly with deal teams and industry/sector groups to understand workflows, identify automation opportunities, and iterate on deployed tools based on real-world banker feedback.
• Build and maintain data pipelines using Databricks and Dagster for feature engineering, model training, and analytics that feed AI capabilities.
• Perform rapid analysis and prototyping-translate a banker's pain point into a working proof of concept within days, not weeks.
• Evaluate and integrate point solutions (Rogo.ai, Blueflame AI, Fellow.ai) via APIs, ensuring clean data flows and consistent user experiences within Salesforce.
• Implement security and data governance protocols appropriate for confidential deal information.

Skills

Full-stack dev

LLM apps

Multi-agent systems

ML fundamentals

Clean code

Capital markets

Azure

Databricks

Dagster

Airflow

Tools

Databricks

Spark

Dagster

Airflow

Salesforce API

SOQL

Azure

CI/CD

Job description

William Blair is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join a newly formed AI Innovation Function within the Investment Banking AI & Technology team. You will embed with deal teams, design end-to-end AI-powered workflows, and set engineering standards for the team, spanning data pipelines, ML models, LLM orchestration, and Salesforce integrations.

You will build AI agents for high-value use cases and work with cross-functional bankers to translate ideas into production-grade solutions, emphasizing