Senior Applied AI Engineer & Tech Lead

Thresh Consulting; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company matching

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Thresh Consulting is seeking an Applied AI Engineering Lead to shape production AI solutions end-to-end. You will decide on AI problem framing, architect the system, and guide a small team of engineers to ship safe, scalable AI engagements.

You’ll balance hands-on development (70%) with team leadership (30%), partnering with client engineering leaders and Thresh practice leads to scope and deliver high-value AI work.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building production software, incl. 2+ years shipping LLM-powered products to real users.
• Strong knowledge of React, TypeScript, and Next.js for production UI work.
• Experience with MCP servers or integration layers for LLMs.
• Deep, hands-on experience with LLM APIs, prompting, tool use, and multi-step agents.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction of AI engagements, architect end-to-end LLM solutions, and decide build vs. buy vs. prompt decisions.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with product/design on conversation design and risk.
• Deliver production AI features on client stacks including guardrails and monitoring.
• Represent Thresh's AI perspective in client workshops and pre-sales discussions.
• Ensure governance, security, and cost controls across deployments.

Skills

LLM engineering

React/TypeScript/Next.js

Python/Node.js

APIs & cloud

MCP servers

LLM evaluation & safety

Cost/latency tradeoffs

Tools

REST/GraphQL

PostgreSQL/NoSQL

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/Vertex)

Job description

Thresh Consulting is seeking an Applied AI Engineering Lead to shape production AI solutions end-to-end. You will decide on AI problem framing, architect the system, and guide a small team of engineers to ship safe, scalable AI engagements.

You’ll balance hands-on development (70%) with team leadership (30%), partnering with client engineering leaders and Thresh practice leads to scope and deliver high-value AI work.