Senior AI Lead

Job Title:  Senior AI App Lead
Work Location: Denver, CO (Hybrid)
Period: 2 Months

About the Role
As the AI Lead  you own both the architecture and the hands-on delivery of AI-powered applications built on Databricks, Python, and React. You set technical direction for a team of data, ML, and full-stack engineers while still writing production code yourself.
You will design LLM, RAG, and agentic systems on the Databricks Lakehouse, expose them through Python services, and deliver them to users through React front ends. You build secure, scalable, cost-efficient production solutions, and you are accountable for making sure the code matches the architecture.

Required Skills & Experience
10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years designing and delivering AI/ML systems in production and hands-on work with generative AI.
Demonstrated experience leading engineers and setting technical direction, while remaining hands-on in code.
Advanced Python: production services, async programming, testing, packaging, and PySpark.
Hands-on Databricks Lakehouse experience: Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow, Databricks Workflows, and Spark-based processing; experience with Model Serving and Vector Search.
Strong React with TypeScript: component architecture, state management, API integration, and streaming or real-time UIs.
Deep understanding of LLMs, RAG architectures, agentic systems, prompt engineering, LLM evaluation, and model fine-tuning.
Proven experience designing scalable distributed systems, REST APIs, and microservices, with a solid grasp of system design and security principles.
Strong SQL, data modeling, ETL/ELT pipeline design, and data governance.
Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform AI and data services.
Hands-on infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Bicep, or CloudFormation), including Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs) for versioning and deploying jobs, pipelines, and model serving endpoints through CI/CD.
Proficient in CI/CD, Git, automated testing, and the full software development life cycle.
Strong stakeholder communication: able to translate architecture into business value for technical and non-technical audiences.