AI/ML Engineer Team Lead

Location: Chicago, IL 60607, United States of America

Estimated hiring range: $117,600–$206,000 per year; incentive eligible.

Company

hirify.global provides an inclusive environment with opportunities for personal and professional development.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture, development, deployment, and operation of enterprise-grade AI and machine learning solutions.
• Design applications combining large language models, agentic workflows, retrieval, structured and unstructured data, APIs, and deterministic processing.
• Translate complex expert workflows into modular, testable, maintainable software components and reusable AI engineering patterns.
• Establish evaluation strategies, observability, regression testing, quality measurement, and stage-level analysis for nondeterministic AI systems.
• Investigate grounding failures, hallucinations, retrieval quality, prompt behavior, model selection, orchestration, latency, accuracy, and cost.
• Partner with domain experts, product, architecture, data, and platform teams while mentoring engineers and leading technical reviews.

Requirements

• Seven or more years of relevant experience.
• Relevant degree preferred.
• Technical leadership experience with complex, production-grade software or AI systems.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, deploying, and operating generative AI or machine learning applications in enterprise production environments.
• Strong Python and modern API and service development experience, including FastAPI or comparable frameworks.
• Experience with large language models, prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool or function calling, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows.
• Experience establishing evaluation strategies using test datasets, regression evaluation, grounding, quality measurement, expert-reviewed outcomes, and failure analysis.
• Understanding of the boundaries between probabilistic AI and deterministic software, rules, retrieval, and data processing.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture, asynchronous processing, APIs, events or queues, persistence, monitoring, and production observability.
• Experience addressing enterprise security, privacy, reliability, auditability, supportability, performance, and cost requirements.
• Strong technical leadership, mentoring, communication, problem-solving, architecture, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with Microsoft Azure, Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, or comparable cloud AI and semantic-retrieval technologies.
• Experience with Databricks, vector databases, embeddings, reranking, semantic search, or enterprise knowledge-retrieval platforms.
• Experience developing AI solutions involving sensitive, regulated, or high-consequence data and decisions.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive environment supporting authentic participation and employee engagement.
• Extensive opportunities for personal and professional development.
• Comprehensive benefits plan.
• Incentive eligibility.
• Equal employment opportunity for applicants and employees regardless of protected characteristics.