We are seeking a Lead AI‑Native Engineer to raise a team's or customer's AI maturity and prove it with numbers. This role designs and ships AI systems, with success measured by what changed for others: engineers who now maintain their own skills, a customer team that moved from pilot to production, and adoption and quality metrics that improved because of how the work was introduced.
Responsibilities
- Lead AI adoption for a squad or customer team: choose the first wins, handle resistance (vendor teams, sceptical senior engineers, delivery pressure), and build trust before changing process
- Design the delivery pipeline and its human gates, choose the model mix, MCP servers, tool sets and skill registry, and set the tool‑restriction policy
- Track adoption and quality metrics (acceptance rate, PR cycle time, defect density, AI‑touched PR ratio), tune the workflow from them, and report outcomes to leadership
- Set how the team or product tracks and controls AI cost: cost per task or outcome, budgets and alerts
- Coach engineers up a level and review the skills and agents they create
- Represent the AI delivery model to client and business stakeholders: explain trade‑offs and hold the delivery model under scope pressure
- Document the operating model so a peer can run it without you
- Harvest reusable skills, patterns and reference architectures back to the wider organization
- Keep a documented path towards more autonomous delivery, and decide which steps are safe to remove human review from
- Keep designing and shipping AI systems: multi‑stage LLM pipelines and agents with a curated tool set, backed by evaluation
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 3+ years of hands‑on experience with LLM or agent systems
- 2+ years in a lead, architect, mentoring or customer‑adoption capacity
- Showcase of moving 3 or more engineers up a level, or moving a customer team from pilot to production use, with numbers to show it
- Background in a production AI system with quantitative outcomes (accuracy, cycle time, cost, hours saved, adoption), the failure modes encountered, and the structural fixes
- Expertise in AI work that runs without daily attention, multi‑step LLM or agent design with tool restriction and schemas, an evaluation approach, and structural fixes for wrong output
- Understanding of trade‑offs named: what was chosen, what was rejected and why, ideally across more than one project
- Track record in adoption: first wins, metrics, tuning, and how resistance was handled
- Proficiency in a cost‑control approach that others follow, including a measured reduction that kept quality
- Familiarity with a documented operating model that a peer can run without the candidate
- Skills in clear communication with outcomes and lessons from real situations, including with skeptical audiences
Nice to have
- Background in reusable patterns adopted by other squads or engagements, and multi‑agent topologies designed and run in production, with observability (token spend, hallucination rate, false‑positive ratio, retry counts)
- Experience in governance and compliance for AI (guardrail policies, approval flows, audit trails)
- Familiarity with pre‑sales or client‑facing work
- Understanding of autonomous delivery pipelines, with concrete next steps
- Showcase of conference talks, internal courses or written guidance on AI adoption