Senior AI Platform Lead - Enterprise AI & Governance

Burtch Works; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Burtch Works in Chicago is seeking an AI Platform Senior Lead to own the technical foundation on which the firm's AI products are built. This senior IC role focuses on the platform layer: model integration and orchestration, retrieval and grounding infrastructure, evaluation tooling, and guardrails for enterprise AI safety.

You will partner with AI Engineering, Data Engineering, Product Management and Data Governance to set direction, drive execution, and shape how AI capabilities are deployed

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science or a related field.
• Significant hands-on software or data engineering experience with senior ownership of a platform or infrastructure area.
• Experience building production apps on large language models—RAG, tool/function calling, agent workflows, or similar patterns.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical direction of the enterprise AI platform, including model access, orchestration, retrieval and grounding services.
• Design and build the integration layer between foundation models, internal data sources and the firm's AI applications.
• Establish evaluation infrastructure with offline tests, golden datasets, regression testing and metrics.
• Build observability, logging, cost tracking and monitoring for AI workloads in production.
• Implement responsible-AI guardrails with Data Governance and Information Security.
• Set engineering standards, patterns and reusable frameworks for AI Engineering teams.
• Lead technical design sessions and own code reviews for platform components.
• Evaluate emerging models, tools and vendor platforms with a clear build-vs-buy rationale.
• Partner with Product Management to translate requirements into platform capabilities.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar in AI engineering practice.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across the AI stack from retrieval quality to latency and cost.

Skills

Python

SQL

Cloud platforms

Model orchestration

RAG pipelines

Leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Data Science

Tools

Databricks

Delta Lake

Unity Catalog

MLOps tooling

Job description

Burtch Works in Chicago is seeking an AI Platform Senior Lead to own the technical foundation on which the firm's AI products are built. This senior IC role focuses on the platform layer: model integration and orchestration, retrieval and grounding infrastructure, evaluation tooling, and guardrails for enterprise AI safety.

You will partner with AI Engineering, Data Engineering, Product Management and Data Governance to set direction, drive execution, and shape how AI capabilities are deployed