Lead AI Systems Architect & Developer Experience Engineer

Cullerton Group; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 85,000 - 143,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Holiday pay

Job summary

Cullerton Group is seeking a senior Lead Software Engineer to architect AI-enabled platforms with hands-on Java backend work, cloud-native development, and strong leadership. You will guide multi-team efforts, implement agentic AI workflows, and push architecture standards across the org.

The role blends enterprise software architecture with production AI, requiring mentoring, RFCs, and governance to deliver scalable, secure AI-powered systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/EE with 10+ years of experience, or Master’s with 8+ years.
• Deep hands-on Java backend development, including microservices and API design.
• Strong software architecture and large-scale distributed systems experience.
• Extensive AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes experience.
• Hands-on production AI agents, prompt engineering, and agentic patterns.
• Experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma, pgvector).
• Experience with Generative AI, LLM-powered apps, AI agents, or automation.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience leading initiatives, mentoring engineers, and cross-team influence.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop multi-agent and stateful AI systems using LangChain/LangGraph/AutoGen.
• Integrate foundation models via secure APIs while managing costs and rate limits.
• Design RAG and semantic-search architectures with relational + vector data.
• Lead architecture for Java backend systems, APIs, microservices and cloud-native apps.
• Set engineering standards and architectural governance across teams.
• Integrate AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf into workflows.
• Mentor engineers and lead architecture reviews, RFCs, and automation efforts.

Skills

Java backend

Distributed systems

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

AI/LLM integration

Mentoring engineers

Architecture governance

Multi-agent AI

MCP

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/EE

Master’s degree

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

AutoGen

CrewAI

Claude

GPT

Gemini

Pinecone

pgvector

Chroma

Job description

Cullerton Group is seeking a senior Lead Software Engineer to architect AI-enabled platforms with hands-on Java backend work, cloud-native development, and strong leadership. You will guide multi-team efforts, implement agentic AI workflows, and push architecture standards across the org.

The role blends enterprise software architecture with production AI, requiring mentoring, RFCs, and governance to deliver scalable, secure AI-powered systems.