Senior AI Lead Engineer

JOB DESCRIPTION

Seeking a Senior AI Lead Engineer to drive the design, development, and delivery of advanced Generative AI solutions while providing leadership across Digital Innovation engineering team. This role combines hands-on engineering with leadership responsibilities to organize and guide R&D team developing innovative AI prototypes.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

AI Engineering & Solution Delivery

• Develop rapid prototypes to demonstrate business value and convert them into reusable assets
• Implement AI-driven approaches to enhance data access, transformation, and workflows
• Design, evaluate, and document Generative AI prototypes using emerging techniques in addition to model evaluation, guardrails, and responsible AI practices

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define reusable architecture patterns and reference implementations
• Establish best practices for AI development lifecycle, CI/CD, and deployment
• Drive standardization and reuse of successful AI prototypes

Leadership & Team Coordination

• Lead and coordinate innovation developers working on multiple AI innovation initiatives
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of experimentation and continuous learning
• Organize work across the team by defining priorities, milestones, and technical direction
• Remove blockers and facilitate collaboration across onshore and offshore team
• Ensure alignment on architecture, coding standards, and best practices
• Balance rapid experimentation with production-grade solution development
• Guide Agile delivery by helping define requirements, track development & documentation, and share reusable patterns

Cloud, DevOps & Infrastructure

• Utilize Azure PaaS services including Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, Content Understanding and other cloud-native offerings.
• Demonstrate deep experience with Azure resources for deployment, configuration, and operations of cloud services.

Execution, Agile & DevOps

• Plan and track work using Azure DevOps (Epics, Features, User Stories) / GitHub Issues
• Ensure predictable prototype delivery across multiple concurrent AI use cases
• Use Git-based workflows and CI/CD automation (Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions).

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Work with Product, and business team to deliver human-centered AI prototypes/patterns
• Communicate technical decisions, progress, and risks to leadership
• Align AI prototypes with enterprise innovation strategy
• Promote adoption of reusable AI patterns and reference implementations through technical demonstrations, documentation, and stakeholder engagement.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

• Extensive Microsoft full-stack development experience
• Experience with Azure PaaS and AI services
• Proven leadership experience managing a technical or innovation team
• Proficiency in C# and Python (preferred)
• Experience with REST APIs, authentication, and cloud-native architecture
• Experience with Azure DevOps/GitHub and CI/CD pipelines
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE

• Experience building Generative AI applications
• Experience designing AI-powered user interfaces
• Experience defining architecture standards and platform practices
• Experience managing multiple initiatives
• Knowledge of Azure Fabric and modern data platforms