Lead, Engineering Excellence (AI)

Location: Hybrid, with in-office presence at least 3 days per week at a Bain office or client location in the United States; 40–60% travel required.

Salary: $179,875 annualized in Atlanta, Boston, Texas, and Chicago; $203,925 annualized in California, New York, Washington, DC, and Washington State, plus discretionary performance bonus.

Company

Bain & Company is a consulting firm whose Vector group leads global software development and engineering standards.

What you will do

• Guide external clients and internal stakeholders through AI-assisted and AI-led engineering transformations across people, process, and technology.
• Design, develop, document, test, and release production-quality AI applications aligned with business outcomes.
• Build end-to-end AI agent systems, including reasoning loops, planning mechanisms, tool orchestration, and multi-agent architectures.
• Develop prompt engineering strategies, structured outputs, model routing, and scalable RAG pipelines with optimized retrieval and embeddings.
• Define product architecture, data flows, integration strategies, build processes, and third-party system integrations with client technical teams.
• Champion software development best practices, participate in ideation, and conduct architecture design, code reviews, and issue resolution.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience in an engineering role at a startup or fast-growing technology company, with increasing mastery and responsibility.
• 5+ years of full-stack development experience and 2+ years of microservice API development using RESTful, GraphQL, or gRPC frameworks.
• 1+ year of experience using AI tools such as Cursor or Claude Code.
• Strong knowledge of development best practices, automated testing, CI/CD, data structures, algorithms, object-oriented programming, performance complexity, and computer architecture.
• Deep understanding of LLMs, transformer architectures, prompt engineering, structured prompting, reasoning control, RAG systems, tokenization, context windows, and cost optimization.
• Ability to evaluate model performance beyond accuracy, including reasoning quality, hallucination rate, and task success.
• Strong Python proficiency for AI development and strong interpersonal and communication skills.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in computer science or a related technical field.
• 1+ year of consulting experience.
• 2+ years of experience with SQL or NoSQL databases, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or SQL Server.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure and high availability, failover, and scalability.
• Ability to explain technical concepts and methodologies to colleagues and clients from other disciplines.

Culture & Benefits

• Permanent full-time employment in a collaborative, diverse engineering and consulting environment.
• Hybrid work model with regular office or client-site presence and substantial travel.
• Annual discretionary performance bonus and potential additional discretionary compensation.
• 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, increasing after three years and fully vested upon start.
• Company-paid individual medical, dental, and vision premiums, plus paid parental leave, sick leave, holidays, life insurance, and long-term disability insurance.