Director, AI and Machine Learning Engineering (AI)

Location: Boston, Chicago, London, São Paulo, or Warsaw; permanent full-time role based at one of these offices.

Salary: $235,750–$282,500 annualized in Massachusetts; $225,750–$270,500 annualized in Illinois. Additional discretionary performance bonus may apply.

Company

Bain & Company is a global consulting firm building an integrated suite of agentic decisioning tools for large organizations.

What you will do

• Build and own the Growth AI Performance System Agentic Core, including multi-agent orchestration, tool registries, shared memory and state management, and user-facing interface infrastructure.
• Develop enterprise AI applications from POCs and MVPs through scaled production, with reliable multi-step workflows, evaluation harnesses, model experimentation, and reusable platform components.
• Design retrieval and knowledge pipelines across vector, keyword, hybrid, and graph-based data, including embeddings, indexing, relevance tuning, caching, access controls, and source attribution.
• Engineer cloud-native APIs and microservices, applying MLOps, AIOps, GenAIOps, CI/CD, reproducibility, versioning, observability, and automated regression testing.
• Implement secure and responsible AI systems with auditability, privacy controls, guardrails, fallbacks, red-teaming, human-in-the-loop review, and governance requirements.
• Work with consulting teams, senior stakeholders, product, engineering, data science, ethics, and infrastructure colleagues; present technical decisions, shape solutions, mentor others, and connect engineering work to commercial outcomes.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building production services with LLM APIs, agentic orchestration frameworks, and Azure or AWS deployments.
• Experience designing agentic workflows and multi-step LLM pipelines, including context engineering, memory and state management, tool integration, routing, planning, reflection, orchestration, ReAct, RLAIF, HITL, and feedback loops.
• Experience building retrieval and knowledge pipelines using vector, keyword, hybrid, and graph-based structures, including vector and graph databases, embedding optimization, indexing, and relevance tuning.
• Proficiency in MLOps and AIOps, including CI/CD, model, prompt and agent versioning, automated evaluation, and agentic observability.
• Advanced prompt engineering, context engineering, conversation design, evaluation frameworks, experimentation, and data-labeling strategies for LLM applications.
• Strong system design, architecture, cost optimization, computational tradeoff, software engineering, testing, profiling, code review, and version-control skills.
• Ability to apply data science and machine learning techniques including feature engineering, model selection, training, validation, and reproducible evaluation.
• Active use of AI-assisted coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent, together with demonstrated responsible AI judgment covering access controls, auditability, bias awareness, and deployment readiness.
• 10 or more years of software engineering or applied AI experience with significant hands-on building responsibilities, including end-to-end production AI or ML delivery.
• Experience delivering complex, multi-stack generative AI programs from conception through production, mentoring engineers, working in agile cross-functional or consulting-adjacent environments, and troubleshooting ambiguous problems.

Nice to have

• Direct experience engaging with clients or senior business stakeholders in a technical capacity, including presenting, advising, or shaping solutions in consulting-adjacent environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-style ownership and influence over architecture and product direction within Bain’s global scale and client network.
• Annual discretionary performance bonus and potential additional discretionary compensation.
• 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, increasing after three years and fully vested from the start.
• Medical, dental, and vision premiums fully covered for individual employees.
• Paid time off including parental leave, sick leave, and holidays, plus paid life and long-term disability insurance.