Senior AI Engineer

Aimlroles; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 125,000 - 147,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Vision & Dental Insurance

Flexible Spending Accounts

Health Savings Account

Retirement Savings Plans

Life & Disability Insurance

Paid Time Off

Job summary

Cushman & Wakefield is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to lead the end-to-end technical direction for AI-powered platforms. You will shape architecture across front-end, back-end, cloud, data, and AI components while embedding AI/ML capabilities into core products for a global real estate enterprise.

The role emphasizes technical breadth, leadership, and delivering scalable, secure systems with modern engineering practices. Strong collaboration with product and architecture teams is required.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and shipping production AI systems and agentic frameworks.
• Strong background in full-stack development and cloud-native architectures.
• Proven ability to lead technical teams and influence product direction.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year architectural direction across full-stack, cloud, and AI products.
• Lead design and delivery of scalable AI-powered solutions for enterprise data estate.
• Mentor engineers, drive standards, and ensure quality, security, and reliability.

Skills

Python

Go

TypeScript/JavaScript

C#

Java

SQL/NoSQL

React

Next.js

Node.js

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Azure

AWS

CI/CD

Observability

LLM/AI systems

AI orchestration

Data governance

Education

Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

Databricks

Unity Catalog

Delta Lake

Terraform

GraphQL

gRPC

Job description

Senior AI Engineer

Job Description Summary

Build the next generation of scalable, AI-powered software with modern tools, cloud-native systems, and world-class engineering practices.

Cushman & Wakefield is investing heavily in modernizing and transforming its global technology platforms — and we are looking for a Sr AI Engineering Lead who wants to own technical direction end to end. AI is the primary differentiator here, not a side feature: you will define how intelligence is embedded across products built on top of a complex, multi-source enterprise data estate spanning a global commercial real estate firm (properties, leases, work orders, capital projects, and occupier analytics).

If you're motivated by technical breadth, architectural influence, and building elite engineering teams — you'll thrive here.

Technology Strategy & Vision

• Define multi-year architectural direction across full-stack systems, cloud platforms, and AI-driven products — focusing on scale, resilience, security, and global performance.
• Establishstandards foragentic workflows, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, and data-grounded reasoning across CW's enterprise platforms.
• Shape engineering roadmaps using best-in-class development stacks (e.g., TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, C#, React, Next.js, microservices, event-driven architectures).
• Foster a modern engineering culture emphasizing automation, craftsmanship, clean architecture, and continuous improvement.

Hands-On Full-Stack & Platform Engineering Leadership

• Guide the design and development of solutions built with:
• Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, micro-frontends
• Backend: Node.js, Python (FastAPI), Go, .NET Core, event-driven microservices
• Cloud & Infra: Azure (preferred), AWS, Kubernetes (AKS/EKS), serverless architectures, Terraform
• Data & AI:Databricks (Genie/AI-BI, Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, medallion architecture, model serving),Azure Data Lake, vector databases, LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks
• APIs:GraphQL,gRPC, REST at scale
• Drive innovation by embedding AI/ML, automation,production prompt engineering (system prompt architecture, context injection, business-rule encoding,citationand grounding patterns),intelligent workflows, and data interoperability into core products.

Execution, Quality & Delivery Excellence

• Enterprise-grade CI/CD (Azure DevOps,ArgoCD)
• Automated testing, contract testing, and quality gates
• Observability platforms (Prometheus,OpenTelemetry, Grafana, New Relic, Datadog)
• Secure-by-design principles, threat modeling, zero trust patterns

Oversee engineering delivery across multiple squads — ensuring consistency, velocity, and reliability.

AI Engineering Standards

• AI evaluation framework design — golden-question sets, hallucination measurement, regression testing, and model quality gates for production AI systems
• Pre-semantic data contracts — schema stability requirements,canonicalentity ID definitions, and data quality thresholds that AI systems can depend on
• AI governance — access control patterns for confidential and client data, responsible use guardrails, and auditability requirements for AI-generated outputs
• LLM system design standards — prompt versioning, context window management, grounding and citation patterns, and failure-mode handling

Architecture, Governance & Platform Integrity

Lead architectural reviews and key design decisions across services, domains, and integrations.

Establish patterns for scalability, fault tolerance, global data compliance, and cost optimization.

Maintainhigh standardsin coding, cloud security, API governance, and data interoperability.

Stakeholder Alignment & Technical Influence

Partner with Product, Architecture, Operations, and Client Technology to prioritize work, unblock teams, and drive outcomes.

Represent engineering in executive and governance forums with clarity around architectural options, tradeoffs, and investment needs.

Translate complex engineering realities into clear business insights that support strategic decision-making.

What You Bring — Technical Background

• Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or relatedfield.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading technical teams or engineering managers.
• Deep experience with modern full-stack development, cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, and high-scale platforms.
• Demonstratedexperience designing and shipping production LLM/AI systems: agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, text-to-SQL grounding, and AI evaluation harnesses.
• Hands-onexpertisewithPython, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, Java, SQL/NoSQL; React, Next.js, Node.js,FastAPI, .NET, Angular Core, microservices, Kubernetes
• Strong command of DevOps, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability.

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic engineering thinker who balances innovation with disciplined execution.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, grow high-performing teams, and attract top talent.
• Ability toinfluenceproduct, business, and technical leadership.
• Comfortable making architectural decisions that require both technical depth and business awareness.

Bonus Experience (Highly Attractive)

• Distributed event streaming (Kafka, EventHub), CQRS/event-sourcing patterns.
• Experience building platforms used across global organizations.
• Experience technically overseeing external development vendors or contract engineering teams.

Cushman & Wakefield also provides eligible employees with an opportunity to enroll in a variety of benefit programs, generally including health, vision, and dental insurance, flexible spending accounts, health savings accounts, retirement savings plans, life, and disability insurance programs, and paid and unpaid time away from work. In addition to a comprehensive benefits package, Cushman and Wakefield provide eligible employees with competitive pay, which may vary depending on eligibility factors such as geographic location, date of hire, total hours worked, job type, business line, and applicability of collective bargaining agreements.

The compensation that will be offered to the successful candidate will depend on factors such as whether the position is covered by a collective bargaining agreement, the geographic area in which the work will be performed, market pay rates in that area, and the candidate’s experience and qualifications.

The company will not pay less than minimum wage for this role.

The compensation for the position is: $ 124,780.00 - $146,800.00Cushman & Wakefield is an Equal Opportunity employer to all protected groups, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities. Discrimination of any type will not be tolerated.

In compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act (ADAAA), if you have a disability and would like to request an accommodation in order to apply for a position at Cushman & Wakefield, please call the ADA line at 1-888-365-5406 or email [e-mail]. Please refer to the job title and job location when you contact us.

INCO: “Cushman & Wakefield”