Lead AI Engineer

At Shift, we are building the next generation of AI-driven platform capabilities. We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Lead AI Engineer in our Data & AI Platform Engineering team to drive our LLMOps roadmap and our most business-critical agentic use cases; someone who is deeply passionate about building, prototyping, and scaling modern AI/LLM systems, while leading a small team.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a senior builder who excels at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technologies (Agentic frameworks, LLM orchestration, MCP, GenAI, MLOps) and production-grade software engineering. You will lead a focused team of engineers and work directly with software engineers and product leaders to design, prototype, and ship state-of-the-art AI systems into production, while acting as the link with our Data Science team to align priorities with their needs and spread best practices.

If you are a senior AI engineer looking for the next step in your career, where you can lead people and shape a roadmap without giving up hands-on coding and building, this role is for you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build agentic systems (hands-on): design and ship production-grade agentic workflows (LLM orchestration, tool calling, MCP, RAG, structured outputs), and define reference architectures that decide what a model handles and what deterministic code handles.
• Own LLMOps standards: evaluation harnesses, prompt and agent versioning, tracing (OpenTelemetry), cost and token governance, and release gates, with tenant-aware patterns that respect client data isolation.
• Evolve our ML platform: be the technical owner of our Databricks-based ML platform (Unity Catalog, MLflow, CI/CD to serving on AKS, monitoring), and extend it toward the agent and prompt lifecycle.
• Run & Serve Open-Weight Models: Partner closely with our Cloud Ops team to design and deploy the architecture required to self-host open-weight foundation models internally. You will own the inference layer and model optimizations (latency, throughput), while collaborating seamlessly with Cloud Ops on GPU resource provisioning and cluster management.
• Push the frontier: run time-boxed POCs on emerging techniques, such as relational foundation models for claims fraud detection or agentic ingestion of medical billing sources to generate claim edits, with clear success criteria and a path to production.
• Lead and grow the team: coach and develop 2 to 5 people, raise the technical bar through design and code reviews, and partner with product, SMEs, architecture, security, and SRE.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Agentic AI expertise: proven experience building production agentic systems (Microsoft Agent Framework, OpenAI Agents SDK, PydanticAI, LangGraph or custom), and strong command of tool calling, MCP, RAG, and evaluation.
• MLOps and engineering: high proficiency in Python; hands-on experience with experiment tracking, model registry, serving, and monitoring (ideally Databricks and MLflow); backend services on Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform and event-driven patterns.
• Applied ML curiosity: solid ML foundations, ability to judge new approaches critically; exposure to graph ML, fraud, or claims data is a plus.
• Software design: high proficiency in Python and strong experience with OOP; proven ability to design robust, maintainable software systems and write clean code, applying the right design patterns and software engineering best practices.
• Leadership: experience leading technical initiatives across stakeholders, and coaching or managing technical contributors (or a clear motivation to do so).
• English fluency required; French is a plus.

HOW YOU WORK (Shift High-Impact Behaviors)

• Jump in and get things done: You are a proactive builder who loves turning ambitious ideas into working code. You don't wait for permission to solve hard problems.
• Make things simpler: You can break down complex AI concepts and architectures into clear, executable steps for engineers, data scientists, and non-technical partners alike.
• Test & learn new things: You are genuinely obsessed with the fast-moving AI landscape. You constantly experiment with new models, libraries, and papers, and know how to extract real product value from the hype.
• Communicate with impact & help others grow: You lead by example and collaboration, upskilling team members through pair programming, code reviews, and pragmatic design discussions.