Lead AI Engineer (FTE)

Position Overview

We are seeking a Lead AI Engineer to lead the design, development, and delivery of AI agents that support key corporate functions across the organization.

This is a highly hands-on role combining approximately 50% AI engineering and development with 50% stakeholder, product, and delivery management. The Lead AI Engineer will be assigned to a specific corporate function, such as Supply Chain, Finance, HR, or another enterprise function, and will work directly with business stakeholders to identify opportunities where AI can improve or automate existing workflows.

The Lead AI Engineer will lead a small delivery pod consisting of one Lead AI Engineer and two AI Engineers. The team will leverage existing AI templates, agents, and enterprise capabilities while developing new solutions where needed.

AI Engineering & Development

• Lead the hands-on development and implementation of AI agents and agentic AI solutions supporting corporate business functions.
• Spend approximately 50% of the role actively coding, developing, testing, and improving AI solutions.
• Build solutions within a Microsoft Azure-based technology environment.
• Leverage existing AI templates, reusable components, and established agents to accelerate development.
• Determine when existing capabilities can be reused or extended versus when new functionality needs to be developed.
• Develop AI solutions that capture, automate, or augment business workflows and operational activities.
• Partner with a dedicated Data Engineering team for data refinement, transformation, integration, and other upstream data needs.
• Ensure AI solutions are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise development standards.

Product, Stakeholder & Delivery Leadership

• Serve as the primary technical partner for stakeholders within an assigned corporate function.
• Work directly with business users to understand how work is currently performed, identify AI use cases, and translate those needs into technical solutions.
• Own the delivery workflow for the pod, including defining priorities, requirements, milestones, and expected outcomes.
• Determine what needs to be delivered, when it needs to be delivered, and how the engineering team will execute against those priorities.
• Translate business problems and processes into clearly defined AI engineering requirements and user stories.
• Manage expectations and communicate progress, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs to business stakeholders.
• Balance multiple competing priorities while keeping AI initiatives moving from concept through production.
• Drive adoption and continuously improve AI solutions based on stakeholder and end-user feedback.

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional data engineering, data science, AI/ML engineering, or related development experience.
• Experience building and deploying AI agents into a large enterprise environment
• Experience developing and deploying generative AI, LLM, AI agent, or agentic workflow solutions in a production environment.
• Strong experience within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and building cloud-based enterprise applications.
• Experience integrating AI applications with enterprise data, APIs, systems, and workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to move between hands-on development and business-facing product/delivery responsibilities.
• Experience gathering requirements directly from business stakeholders and translating business processes into technical solutions.
• Ability to own technical delivery, including prioritization, scoping, execution, and stakeholder communication.
• Experience leading or providing technical direction to other engineers.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with technologies such as Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft Semantic Kernel, Azure AI Search, or related Microsoft AI services.
• Experience designing or developing AI agents, copilots, RAG solutions, or multi-step AI workflows.
• Experience supporting enterprise corporate functions such as Supply Chain, Finance, HR, Procurement, Legal, or Operations.
• Experience functioning as a technical product owner, engineering lead, or technical delivery lead.
• Experience working with reusable AI platforms, templates, frameworks, or existing enterprise AI agents.