Lead AI Engineer — Generative AI & Agent Systems

Bain & Company; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 203,500 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual discretionary bonus

Excellent health and wellness benefits

Generous paid time off

401(k) with matching

Job summary

Bain & Company’s AIS team seeks a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for enterprise clients, collaborating across engineering, product, and data science teams. The role emphasizes hands‑on delivery from prototyping to production and mentorship of junior engineers.

The position requires in‑person collaboration at Bain offices or client sites at least three days per week, with travel as needed.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles with hands‑on building responsibilities.
• Demonstrated experience shipping generative AI features end‑to‑end from prototyping to production.
• Clear communication skills to explain technical concepts to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and data science teams; mentoring peers is a plus.
• Strong prompt engineering and context engineering skills; familiarity with conversation design principles.
• Experience with RAG architectures (vector retrieval; hybrid/graph approaches a plus).
• Experience with agentic patterns (tool use, routing, memory management; multi‑agent systems a plus).
• Familiarity with HITL frameworks (ReAct, RLAIF) and AI safety concepts.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to design, development, and deployment of end‑to‑end generative AI systems.
• Build multi‑component AI pipelines including RAG, embedding generation, and tuning.
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Develop agentic systems with proper memory management and tool integration.
• Contribute across the full stack: model experimentation, evaluation design, and deployment.
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud deployments with observability.
• Support GenAIOps processes for testing, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Balance performance, safety, and cost across system design; implement guardrails and HITL workflows.

Skills

Generative AI

MLOps

RAG architectures

Agentic systems

System design

Production deployment

Python

Tools

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Graph databases

Model + API ecosystems

Job description

Bain & Company’s AIS team seeks a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for enterprise clients, collaborating across engineering, product, and data science teams. The role emphasizes hands‑on delivery from prototyping to production and mentorship of junior engineers.

The position requires in‑person collaboration at Bain offices or client sites at least three days per week, with travel as needed.