Lead AI Engineer (AI)

Location: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or Washington, DC, United States. Requires working in person at least three days per week at a client location or Bain home office; travel beyond the primary work location is required.

Annual full-time salary: $203,500 in New York City, California, Washington State, and Washington, DC; $179,500 in Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Texas. Other locations follow competitive geographic market rates. Additional compensation may include a discretionary performance bonus.

Company

Bain & Company is a management consulting firm whose AI, Insights & Solutions team designs and delivers AI-powered solutions for clients in collaboration with consultants, product, design, architecture, engineering, and client stakeholders.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and deploy end-to-end generative AI systems, multi-agent workflows, and production-grade AI applications.
• Build AI pipelines covering RAG, fine-tuning, parameter-efficient tuning, embedding optimization, and vector, graph, and keyword retrieval.
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, orchestration, memory architecture, and tool integration for agentic systems.
• Develop APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native deployments, observability, and reliability capabilities.
• Build GenAIOps and automated evaluation systems for testing, regression evaluation, latency, relevance, factual consistency, throughput, and cost.
• Partner with product, engineering, data science, ethics, infrastructure, and client stakeholders while contributing technical insights and mentoring peers.

Requirements

• 3–5+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles.
• Experience shipping generative AI features or systems end-to-end, from prototyping through production.
• Strong prompt engineering, context engineering, and conversation design skills.
• Working knowledge of evaluation design, experimentation frameworks, and data-labeling strategies for LLM applications.
• Experience with RAG architectures, vector-based retrieval, agentic patterns, tool use, routing, memory management, ReAct, RLAIF, and human-in-the-loop feedback loops.
• Knowledge of orchestration frameworks, vector and graph databases, and model and API ecosystems.
• Strong system design, architecture, and production deployment background, including LLM cost and latency tradeoffs.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders and collaborate across engineering, product, and data science teams.
• Comfort working in high-ambiguity environments; eagerness to grow into technical leadership and support junior team members.

Nice to have

• Exposure to hybrid or graph-based retrieval and multi-agent systems.
• Experience supporting or informally mentoring peers.
• Experience in client-facing consulting or enterprise transformation environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Multidisciplinary, collaborative work with experienced teammates and an apprenticeship model.
• Opportunities to work with major AI ecosystem partners on real client deployments and enterprise transformations.
• 4.5% 401(k) company contribution, increasing after three years and fully vested upon start.
• Bain pays 100% of individual employee medical, dental, and vision premiums.
• Paid time off, parental leave, sick leave, paid holidays, life insurance, long-term disability insurance, and wellness benefits.