We are seeking a Lead AI Engineer to join our Business Operations team. This position may be able to work remotely from anywhere within the United States. The **Lead AI Engineer** is the first engineering hire on AFL's AI Enablement team, responsible for designing, building, and deploying agentic AI systems that automate the operational backbone of the business through workflow orchestration, model adaptation, and analytics. Working directly with the AI Enablement Manager, the Lead AI Engineer will help lay the technical foundation the rest of the team will build on - including model selection and management, deployment posture, orchestration patterns, evaluation and audit. As the team grows, an AI Product Manager and AI Operations Specialists will join to take on intake, sequencing, stakeholder coordination, and product ownership of deployed solutions, allowing engineers to stay focused on build work. **Responsibilities:** Key responsibilities/essential functions include: **Architecture & Technical Foundation** - Establishes the architectural patterns, evaluation practices, and deployment standards for the team - Makes framework and model recommendations that set the foundation for how the team builds - evaluates orchestration frameworks, selects deployment patterns, trains and fine-tunes models, and determines where managed platforms end and custom build begins **Solution Design & Delivery** - Translates proposed business solutions into technical plans - defines product life cycles, prioritizes the backlog, and breaks initiatives into buildable work - Owns solutions end-to-end: technical planning, architecture, build, deploy, and the monitoring that keeps them honest in production **Production Reliability** - Builds the monitoring, evaluation, and regression detection systems that keep production agents reliable - including logging, performance benchmarking, and feedback loops that surface drift early **Governance & Collaboration** - Partners with data governance to ensure solutions meet compliance, data quality, and operational standards **Personal Qualities:** - Innovative and tech-savvy, with deep curiosity about emerging AI capabilities and how to apply them - Analytical and detail-oriented, with a strong engineering mindset - Collaborative and communicative, able to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders - Self-directed and accountable, able to set technical direction and drive execution independently **Qualifications:** - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience - 7+ years of software engineering experience with a strong full-stack foundation - backend services, API design, system integration, and data infrastructure - Recent hands-on experience building AI or LLM-backed systems and shipping them to production - Experience architecting solutions from scratch and owning them through deployment, observability, testing, and ongoing reliability - Experience with AI development practices - model selection, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and understanding when each approach is the right fit - Proficiency in Python; experience with cloud platforms - Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction across multiple initiatives - Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders **Working Conditions:** - Environment: Remote work environment (US-based). - Travel: Occasional travel (domestic) as needed.