Lead, Engineering Excellence

Bain & Company; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 293,000 - 358,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Premium medical/dental/vision coverage

Generous paid time off

401(k) with employer contribution

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

Bain & Company, Inc. in Washington, DC is seeking a software engineer focused on AI-driven transformations.

You will join a diverse engineering team to design, develop, and deploy AI-enabled applications and RAG pipelines, aligning initiatives with client business outcomes. Ideal candidates bring 5+ years of full-stack experience, strong Python and AI tooling, cloud familiarity, and a track record of delivering scalable systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s in computer science or related field or equivalent
• 5+ years of full-stack development experience
• 2+ years micro-service API development (REST/GraphQL/gRPC)
• 1+ years experience with AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code)
• Strong knowledge of development best practices (CI/CD, testing)
• Deep understanding of LLMs and transformer architectures
• Experience designing and deploying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems

Responsibilities

• Lead AI-enabled transformation initiatives across people, processes, and tech
• Improve developer productivity via AI tooling adoption
• Design, develop, and document AI applications aligned to business outcomes
• Develop and optimize LLM-powered apps with prompting and routing strategies
• Contribute to full SDLC including architecture, testing, docs, reviews
• Provide technical guidance to clients and internal teams
• Translate business requirements into robust technical specs and scalable systems

Skills

Full-stack development

Python

AI tooling

Cloud platforms

RESTful APIs

GraphQL

gRPC

CI/CD

Prompt engineering

LLMs

Education

Bachelor’s in computer science

Master’s in computer science

Tools

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

SQL Server

AWS

GCP

Azure

FastAPI

Swagger/OpenAPI

CUDA/LLM tooling

Job description

We are proud to be consistently recognized as one of the world’s best places to work. We are currently the top ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list and have earned the #1 overall spot a record seven times.

Extraordinary teams are at the heart of our business strategy, but these don’t happen by chance. They require intentional focus on bringing together a broad set of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and skills in a supportive and inclusive work environment. We hire people with exceptional talent and create an environment in which every individual can thrive professionally and personally.

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

Bain’s Vector leads the firm’s software development efforts and defines engineering standards for Bain globally.

You will solve cutting-edge problems for a variety of industries as a software engineer specializing in strategy for Engineering Transformations. As a member of a diverse engineering team, you will participate in the full software development life cycle.

You will collaborate with diverse product and engineering teams to build help engineering organizations transform across people, process, and technology to support business needs for both consumer and enterprise environments.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Help clients improve AI-assisted or AI-led maturity across people, process, and technology
• Help developers improve productivity through adoption of AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex etc.)
• Design, develop, and document AI applications aligned to business outcomes.
• Develop prompt engineering strategies, implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and optimize model inference latency and cost
• Develop and champion modern software development best practices and concepts to technical audience and business stakeholders
• Participate within a cross functional product team to develop and deploy production quality code for clients
• Participate in the full software development life cycle including architecture design, writing documentation and unit/integration tests, identifying issues and resolution, writing clean code, and conducting code reviews

Provide technical guidance to external clients and internal stakeholders in Bain (80%):

• Drive AI-led or AI-assisted transformation to improve productivity and quality across the PDLC
• Explore new innovations in AI and software development to further improve productivity and modularity.
• Take an active role in ideation processes, alongside consulting and client colleagues, to bring innovative solutions to problems
• Work in a collaborative manner with clients’ technical teams to define technical approaches to implementing designed solutions, including new product architecture, data flows and integration strategies, build processes, etc

Scope, architect, design, develop, build, and release robust and scalable applications (20%):

• Translate business requirements into technical requirements and implementation details
  • Build complex systems that are extensible, easy to understand, and self-maintaining
  • Integration with third-party systems to enable use cases that power business solutions
• Work closely with product and design to create modern AI systems.
  • Build end-to-end AI agent systems, including reasoning loops, planning mechanisms, and tool orchestration frameworks
  • Develop and optimize LLM-powered applications using advanced prompting, structured outputs, and model routing strategies
  • Design and implement multi-agent architectures (planner, executor, verifier, critic patterns)
  • Build scalable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines with optimized embedding and retrieval strategies

ABOUT YOU

We are looking for someone who has:

• Bachelor’s in computer science or a related technical field; or equivalent work experience
• Experience in an engineering role at a start-up or fast-growing tech company, with a strong track record of increasing mastery and responsibility
• 5+ years of experience with full-stack development
• 2+ years of experience with micro-service API development (e.g., RESTful, GraphQL, gRPC) with frameworks (e.g. FastAPI, Swagger, OpenAPI etc.)
• 1+ years of experience with AI tools (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.)
• Strong knowledge in development best practices (automated testing frameworks, CI/CD etc.)
• Strong computer science fundaments in data structures, algorithms, automated testing, object-oriented programming, performance complexity, and implications of computer architecture on software performance
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and transformer architectures
• Strong knowledge of prompt engineering, structured prompting, and reasoning control techniques
• Experience designing and deploying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems
• Ability to evaluate model performance beyond accuracy (reasoning quality, hallucination rate, task success)
• Understanding of tokenization, context window limits, and cost optimization strategies
• Strong Python proficiency for AI development

Ideal candidates will also have experience in:

• Master’s in computer science or a related technical field
• 1+ years of experience in consulting
• 2+ years of experience with SQL or NoSQL databases
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or SQL Server
• Experience working on public cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and associated deep understanding of failover, high-availability, and high scalability
• Ability to explain and discuss technical concepts and methodologies with colleagues and clients from other disciplines
• This role follows a hybrid model, requiring in-office presence at least 3 days per week, either at a client location or at your Bain home office
• Travel is required (~25%)

U.S. COMPENSATION INFORMATION

Compensation for this role includes base salary, annual discretionary performance bonus, 401(k) plan with an annual employer contribution based on years of service and Bain’s best in class benefits package (details listed below).

Some local governments in the United States require a good-faith, reasonable salary range be included in job postings for open roles. The estimated annualized compensation for this role is as follows:

In Atlanta, Boston, Texas, and Chicago the good-faith, reasonable annualized full-time salary range for this role is $179,875

In California, New York, Washington, DC and Washington State, the good-faith, reasonable annualized salary for this role is $203,925

Placement within these ranges will vary based on factors such as experience, education, training, and skill level.

Compensation also includes a discretionary annual performance bonus, 401(k) plan with employer contribution, and Bain’s best-in-class benefits—including full premium coverage for medical, dental, and vision, generous paid time off, and more.

Annual discretionary performance bonus

This role may also be eligible for other elements of discretionary compensation

4.5% 401(k) company contribution, which increases after 3 years of service and is 100% vested upon start date

Bain & Company's comprehensive benefits and wellness program is designed to help employees achieve personal independence, protection and stability in the areas most important to you and your family.

Bain pays 100% individual employee premiums for medical, dental and vision programs, offering one of the most comprehensive medical plans for employees without impacting your paycheck

Generous paid time off, including parental leave, sick leave and paid holidays

Fully vested 401(k) company contribution

Paid Life and Long-Term Disability insurance