Lead Game AI Engineer

Straive; Newark (NJ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Straive is seeking a highly technical Sr. Gen AI Engineer / Lead Gen AI Engineer to design, develop, and deploy production-grade Generative AI applications. You will bridge cutting-edge AI research with full-stack engineering, mentoring engineers, and delivering robust AI-powered solutions.

The role covers architecture, task leadership, code reviews, and hands-on implementation across Python, FastAPI, and React, with emphasis on scalable MLOps, vector databases, and cloud infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 6 to 12 years of professional software engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and optimize LLM-powered applications and multi-agent workflows.

Skills

Gen AI & LLMs

Agentic Systems

RAG & Document Intelligence

OCR & Vision Techniques

Python

FastAPI

React

TypeScript/JavaScript

AsyncIO

Cloud & DevOps

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

AutoGen

CrewAI

LangSmith

TruLens

RAGAS

Pinecone

Qdrant

Chroma

PGVector

Azure

AWS

Job description

Job Description

We are seeking a highly technical, hands-on Sr. Gen AI Engineer / Lead Gen AI Engineer to drive the design, development, and deployment of production-grade Generative AI applications. In this dual-impact role, you will act as a primary individual contributor architecting core AI engines while simultaneously leading engineers through task allocation, code reviews, and technical mentorship. The ideal candidate bridges the gap between state-of-the-art AI research (LLMs, Agentic frameworks, Advanced RAG, OCR) and production-grade full-stack engineering (Python, FastAPI, React).

Key Responsibilities

• Generative AI & Agentic Systems: Architect, build, and optimize LLM-powered applications, multi-agent workflows (e.g., CrewAI, AutoGen, LangGraph), and autonomous AI agents.
• RAG & Document Intelligence: Design and deploy advanced RAG architectures and document processing pipelines utilizing OCR techniques (e.g., LayoutLM, PaddleOCR, Tesseract, Azure Document Intelligence) and Vision LLMs to extract structured data.
• Backend Microservices: Build robust, asynchronous, high-throughput microservices and RESTful APIs using Python and FastAPI.
• Frontend Integration: Collaborate on or build modern web interfaces using React (e.g., Control Towers, operations dashboards, interactive chat interfaces).
• MLOps & Infrastructure: Oversee model deployment, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, vector database integration (Pinecone, Qdrant, Chroma, PGVector), and cloud infrastructure setup (Azure/AWS).
• Technical Oversight: Lead a team of AI, backend, and full-stack engineers; allocate tasks, establish sprint priorities, and ensure timely delivery.
• Conduct rigorous code reviews: to maintain high engineering standards, security, performance, and scalability across AI and full-stack codebases.

Key Qualifications & Skills

• Overall Experience: 6 to 12 years of professional software engineering experience.
• AI/ML Domain Experience: 3+ years of dedicated, hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML, OCR, and Generative AI solutions in production.
• Core Technical Stack:
  • Generative AI & LLMs: Extensive experience with commercial and open-source LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Llama), Agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI), and LLM evaluation frameworks (LangSmith, TruLens, RAGAS).
  • RAG & Unstructured Data: Strong knowledge of hybrid search, re-ranking, chunking strategies, vector databases, and document intelligence workflows.
  • OCR & Vision Techniques: Hands-on experience with OCR engines (Tesseract, PaddleOCR, Azure Document Intelligence) and Multi-Modal/Vision LLMs.
  • Backend: Deep expertise in Python and asynchronous frameworks (FastAPI, AsyncIO).
  • Frontend: Working proficiency in React (TypeScript/JavaScript) for building interactive web UI components.
  • Cloud & DevOps: Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure / AWS), Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.