Lead Generative AI Architect

Bain & Company; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 179,500 - 203,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company contribution

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Generous paid time off

Fitness reimbursements

Job summary

Bain & Company in Washington, DC is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for enterprise clients. You will work across prototyping to production, collaborating with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists to deliver scalable AI applications.

This hands-on role emphasizes execution, architecture, and mentoring junior team members, with opportunities to partner with AI ecosystem partners and influence technical direction.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles with hands-on building responsibilities.
• Demonstrated experience shipping generative AI features or systems end-to-end, from prototyping through production.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical collaborators and stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across engineering, product, and data science teams; mentoring is a plus.
• Solid prompt engineering and context engineering skills; familiarity with conversation design principles.
• Working knowledge of evaluation design, experimentation frameworks, and data labeling strategies for LLM applications.
• Experience with: RAG architectures, agentic patterns, ReAct, RLAIF, HITL, and AI-specific tools & frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design, development, and deployment of end-to-end generative AI systems, including multi-agent workflows and production-grade AI applications.
• Build and iterate on multi-component AI pipelines, including retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, embedding generation, and hybrid strategies.
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Build and contribute to agentic systems with memory management and tool integration.
• Contribute across the full stack: model experimentation, evaluation design, and production system deployment.
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments with observability and reliability.
• Support GenAIOps processes for automated testing, regression evaluation, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Balance performance, safety, responsible AI principles, and cost across system design; implement guardrails and HITL workflows.

Skills

Software engineering

ML engineering

Generative AI

Communication skills

Collaboration across teams

Prompt engineering

Evaluation design

Tools

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Graph databases

Model + API ecosystems

Job description

Bain & Company in Washington, DC is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for enterprise clients. You will work across prototyping to production, collaborating with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists to deliver scalable AI applications.

This hands-on role emphasizes execution, architecture, and mentoring junior team members, with opportunities to partner with AI ecosystem partners and influence technical direction.