We're building production conversational AI - LLM agents that hold real conversations at scale, answer from a grounded knowledge base, and know their limits. We're looking for a hands-on Lead AI Engineer to own it end to end: the AI behavior, the infrastructure, and the full stack around it.

We're a small, focused team tackling a big problem - making AI that's accurate, grounded, and trustworthy in production. That means high ownership, fast decisions, and direct impact: what you build ships and runs live.

This is a builder-leader role. You write code, make the architecture calls, and set the technical direction for the team.

What you'll do

Own the AI system - LLM agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and guardrails. Drive answer quality, retrieval relevance, and safe behavior.
Debug and improve AI behavior - diagnose why a model hallucinated, mis-routed, or responded incorrectly, and design evaluations (LLM-as-judge and others) to measure and prevent it. Turn vague it answered badly reports into measured fixes.
Lead platform engineering - design and ship the services, data pipelines, and tooling that let the product scale reliably.
Own infrastructure as code - Terraform across multiple environments, CI/CD, and a server-less cloud footprint.
Build full-stack - backend services, an internal web app, and data-processing pipelines.
Own security and data protection - treat it as first-class: data isolation, least-privilege access, encryption, careful handling of credentials and sensitive user data. Security is a core requirement of everything we ship, not an afterthought.
Set technical direction - review designs and code, define quality bars, and keep production healthy.

Must have

You've shipped an LLM application to production - agents and/or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), with guardrails and a vector/embeddings layer. Not just prototypes.
Strong prompt engineering and AI debugging - you can reason about model behavior and build evaluations to measure it.
Terraform / infrastructure as code and solid AWS depth (serverless compute, NoSQL, event-driven flows, IAM).
Full-stack engineering - TypeScript/Node, a modern web framework (React/Next.js), and Python for data work.
Strong security and data-protection fundamentals - you build systems that handle sensitive user data safely: data isolation, least-privilege access, encryption, and secrets management.
Ownership and technical leadership - able to lead a project and keep a production system reliable.

Nice to have

Experience with Amazon Bedrock (agents, knowledge bases, guardrails) - a strong advantage.
SaaS / multi-tenant platform design.
Production observability and cost optimization for AI workloads.

What success looks like

The AI answers more questions correctly and grounded, and stays within its limits - measured, not guessed.
The platform scales smoothly, with safe and repeatable infrastructure changes.

Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Conversational AI