Lead AI Engineer (Generative AI)

Location: Paris, EMEA. The role requires at least three days per week working in person at a client location or Bain home office, with additional project-related travel.

Company

Bain & Company’s Applied Technology & AI team designs and delivers AI-powered solutions with measurable business impact for clients.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and deploy end-to-end generative AI systems, multi-agent workflows, and production-grade applications.
• Build RAG pipelines with vector, graph, and keyword retrieval, including fine-tuning, embeddings, and hybrid retrieval.
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, orchestration, memory architectures, and agentic systems.
• Develop APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native deployments, and GenAIOps processes with observability and reliability.
• Build evaluation suites and frameworks covering factual consistency, relevance, precision/recall, latency, throughput, cost, and system performance.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, data science, infrastructure, ethics teams, and client stakeholders while sharing technical knowledge and supporting junior colleagues.

Requirements

• 3–5+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI, including shipping generative AI systems from prototype to production.
• French proficiency at C1 level or higher.
• Strong prompt engineering, context engineering, and conversation design skills.
• Working knowledge of evaluation design, experimentation frameworks, and data labelling strategies for LLM applications.
• Experience with RAG architectures, agentic patterns, tool use, routing, memory management, ReAct, RLAIF, HITL feedback loops, orchestration frameworks, vector and graph databases, and model/API ecosystems.
• Strong system design, architecture, and production-grade deployment background, including understanding of LLM cost and latency trade-offs.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to collaborate in high-ambiguity, cross-functional environments and eagerness to grow into technical leadership while supporting junior team members.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Work in multidisciplinary teams with consultants, product, design, architecture, engineering, and client stakeholders.
• Participate in real client deployments and collaborate with major AI ecosystem partners.
• Learn through Bain’s apprenticeship model, experienced teammates, frequent feedback, and increasing responsibility.
• Work in a supportive and inclusive environment focused on professional and personal development.
• Work in person at least three days per week at a Bain office or client location, with additional travel based on project needs.