Lead Generative AI Engineer

Bain & Company; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 161,550 - 197,450; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual discretionary bonus

401(k) company contribution

Paid time off

Medical, dental, vision coverage

Fitness reimbursements

Job summary

Bain & Company is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for clients in a hands-on, individual contributor role. You’ll work across the full development lifecycle with Bain’s AIS team, collaborating with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists.

You’ll contribute to end-to-end AI pipelines, including RAG, tool integration, and model evaluation, while mentoring junior colleagues and shaping technical direction.

Qualifications

• 3–5+ years in software/ML engineering or applied AI with hands-on building responsibilities.
• Experience shipping generative AI features end-to-end from prototyping to production.
• Strong communication to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborates across engineering, product, and data science; mentoring is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy end-to-end generative AI systems and multi-agent workflows.
• Develop multi-component AI pipelines with RAG, fine-tuning, and embedding strategies.
• Implement tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Contribute to agentic systems with memory architecture and tool integration.
• Build APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments.
• Support GenAIOps for automated testing, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Balance performance, safety, and cost with responsible AI practices and guardrails.
• Design evaluation frameworks for hallucination, relevance, latency, and cost.

Skills

Generative AI features

System design

Cross-functional collaboration

Prototyping to production

Prompt engineering

Communication

Evaluation design

Cost and latency awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

Tools

Orchestration frameworks

Vector databases

Graph databases

Model + API ecosystems

Job description

Bain & Company is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and ship generative AI systems for clients in a hands-on, individual contributor role. You’ll work across the full development lifecycle with Bain’s AIS team, collaborating with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists.

You’ll contribute to end-to-end AI pipelines, including RAG, tool integration, and model evaluation, while mentoring junior colleagues and shaping technical direction.