Lead Generative AI Engineer

Bain & Company, Inc.; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 162,000 - 197,000; Full time

Job summary

Bain & Company, Inc. is seeking an AI Engineer within Applied Technology & AI to design, build, and deploy generative AI systems for client transformations. You will work across the full lifecycle from prototyping to production, collaborating with data scientists, engineers, and product managers.

The role emphasizes hands-on contribution, mentoring, and partnering with partners across Bain to implement scalable AI solutions with strong governance and responsible AI practices.

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; some experience supporting or informally mentoring peers 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 (vector-based retrieval; exposure to hybrid or graph-based approaches is a plus)
• Agentic patterns (tool use, routing, memory management; multi-agent systems experience is a plus)
• ReAct, RLAIF, and other HITL + feedback loops.
• AI-Specific Tools & Frameworks - Orchestration frameworks, Vector and graph databases and Model + API ecosystems

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 (RAG), Fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning, Embedding generation and optimization, Hybrid retrieval strategies (vector, graph, keyword).
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows
• Build and contribute to agentic systems, applying sound engineering principles around separation of concerns, memory architecture, 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 attention to observability and reliability
• Support and help build 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, fallbacks, red-teaming strategies, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows
• Partner with global ethics teams to ensure alignment with Bain’s Responsible AI standards
• Build automated evaluation suites integrating user signals, continual learning cycles, and ongoing model updates
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks covering: Hallucination rate and factual consistency, Relevance and precision/recall, Latency, throughput, and system-level performance, Cost tracking and efficiency
• Partner closely with product, engineering, data science, ethics, and infrastructure teams to build robust, compliant AI systems
• Contribute technical insights and communicate findings clearly to cross-functional stakeholders and, where relevant, clients
• Share knowledge with peers and support a culture of technical learning around RAG, agents, prompt engineering, and AI safety

Skills

Software engineering

ML engineering

Applied AI

Prompt engineering

Evaluation design

RAG architectures

Agentic patterns

ReAct HITL

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Graph databases

Model ecosystems

Tools

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Graph databases

Model ecosystems

Job description

Bain & Company, Inc. is seeking an AI Engineer within Applied Technology & AI to design, build, and deploy generative AI systems for client transformations. You will work across the full lifecycle from prototyping to production, collaborating with data scientists, engineers, and product managers.

The role emphasizes hands-on contribution, mentoring, and partnering with partners across Bain to implement scalable AI solutions with strong governance and responsible AI practices.