Lead AI Systems Engineer

Role Summary

We are seeking a Lead Engineer, AI Systems to serve as the technical anchor across our AI-augmented engineering organisation. This role bridges our Senior AI Coding Engineers, the AI/ML Developer (SLM Specialist), and the Agentic Systems intern cohort. You will set technical direction, own cross-cutting architectural decisions, and champion the responsible, high-impact adoption of AI-assisted development practices across the entire engineering function.

You will remain hands-on with code while simultaneously shaping how the wider team builds, evaluates, and ships AI-powered products.

Key Responsibilities

1  Technical Vision & Architecture

• Define and own the end-to-end technical architecture for AI Systems — spanning product feature surfaces, model inference APIs, and agentic toolchains.
• Drive Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), system design reviews, and RFC processes across squads.
• Establish standards for integrating SLM/LLM model endpoints into product surfaces built by the Senior Engineering team.
• Evaluate emerging AI infrastructure patterns (RAG, agentic orchestration, vector stores, model serving) and guide adoption decisions.
• Own the technical roadmap for AI tooling, developer productivity, and model integration layers.

2  Cross-Squad Technical Leadership

• Act as the primary technical liaison between the AI/ML Developer (model side) and Senior Engineers (product side), ensuring smooth API contracts, evaluation loops, and deployment handoffs.
• Provide technical direction to Agentic Systems interns, reviewing designs, code, and agentic pipeline implementations.
• Unblock senior engineers on hard architectural or integration challenges that span squad boundaries.
• Run cross-team design reviews, architecture syncs, and engineering guild sessions.

3  AI-Augmented Engineering Excellence

• Define and maintain the organisation’s standards for AI-assisted development — covering context engineering, AI code review protocols, context management, and tool evaluation criteria.
• Maintain and evolve the internal AI tooling playbook (Cursor IDE, Claude Code, Codex CLI, and emerging tools).
• Evaluate new AI coding tools, agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen), and developer-productivity platforms; produce adoption recommendations with measured trade-offs.
• Conduct structured audits of AI-generated code across squads for correctness, security, and maintainability.

4  Hands-On Engineering

• Remain an active contributor: own critical-path features, prototype architectural spikes, and build shared infrastructure components used across squads.
• Personally drive resolution of the most complex production incidents and root-cause analyses.
• Review and merge high-impact PRs; maintain the highest code review quality bar on the team.
• Own observability and reliability for AI inference and MLOps integration layers in production.

5  Mentoring & Talent Development

• Mentor Senior Engineers, the AI/ML Developer, and interns through technical coaching, design feedback, and stretch assignments.
• Lead hiring panels and technical interviews; help define and uphold the engineering hiring bar.
• Contribute to onboarding frameworks that embed AI-first practices from day one.
• Model a culture of rigorous experimentation, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.

6  Stakeholder & Product Collaboration

• Partner with the Director of Engineering and Product leadership to translate product strategy into a phased technical roadmap.
• Present architectural proposals and trade-off analyses to engineering leadership and executive stakeholders as required.
• Coordinate with DevOps/Platform teams on GPU/TPU compute provisioning, CI/CD for model pipelines, and cloud cost optimisation.

Required Qualifications

1  Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or a related field.
• Candidates without a degree but with a compelling portfolio demonstrating scope and impact at staff/lead level will be considered.

2  Experience

• 6 – 8 years of professional software engineering experience in product-focused environments.
• Minimum 2 years in a formal or de-facto technical lead / staff engineer capacity across multiple squads or systems.
• Minimum 8-12 months of active, hands-on experience with AI coding tools in a professional engineering setting.
• Proven track record of shipping production systems with measurable business impact at scale.
• Demonstrated experience collaborating closely with ML/AI model teams on integration, deployment, and evaluation.

3  Technical Skills — Core Engineering

• Languages: Expert proficiency in at least two of — Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go.
• Architecture: Microservices, event-driven systems, API design (REST, GraphQL, gRPC), distributed systems fundamentals.
• Databases: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis); vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate).
• Cloud: AWS, GCP, or Azure — compute, storage, serverless, managed ML services (SageMaker, Vertex AI).
• DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins); IaC (Terraform/Pulumi); observability stacks.
• Testing: TDD/BDD; unit, integration, and e2e frameworks; model evaluation pipelines.

4  AI / ML Integration Skills (Mandatory)

• Demonstrated proficiency with AI coding assistants (Cursor IDE, Claude Code, Codex CLI) in daily professional workflows.
• Experience designing and consuming LLM/SLM inference APIs; understanding of model serving, latency, and cost trade-offs.
• Hands-on familiarity with RAG architectures, vector stores, and retrieval pipelines.
• Ability to define and enforce AI code quality standards across an engineering team.
• Understanding of LLM limitations: hallucinations, context window constraints, prompt injection risks, and licensing considerations.

5  Technical Skills — Nice to Have

• Experience with SLM/LLM training or fine-tuning pipelines (SFT, RLHF, LoRA/QLoRA).
• Familiarity with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI) and multi-step reasoning pipelines.
• Contributions to open-source ML or developer tooling projects.
• Knowledge of OWASP Top 10, secure coding, and AI-specific security risks (prompt injection, model exfiltration).
• Prior experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment with rapid iteration cycles.

Behavioural Competencies

• AI-First Mindset: Defaults to AI tools to accelerate work while maintaining rigorous quality standards; actively pushes the team’s AI capability forward.
• Systems Thinking: Sees the full picture — how model outputs, product surfaces, and infrastructure interdepend; anticipates second-order effects of architectural choices.
• Ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility from design through production; doesn’t hand off problems, solves them.
• Influence Without Authority: Earns trust through technical credibility; drives alignment through persuasion, data, and well-reasoned proposals.
• Communication: Writes clear design docs, ADRs, and post-mortems; articulates complex trade-offs for engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Mentorship: Actively invests in the growth of engineers at all levels; gives direct, constructive feedback.
• Pragmatism: Balances the ideal with the shipped; knows when to iterate vs. refactor vs. rewrite.
• Curiosity: Continuously explores emerging research, tools, and patterns — and brings those learnings back to the team.