Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer uPerform – the fastest and easiest solution to help enterprises and health care organizations rapidly create, manage, and distribute targeted learning content – is looking for an experienced and driven Lead AI Engineer to join our Software Development & Innovation Group (SDIG). The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader who has shipped generative AI features to production and led the engineers who build them. This individual will split their time evenly between building and leading, setting technical direction for our AI products – conversational search, AI analytics, and adaptive learning – while maintaining uPerform’s standards of quality and excellence.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor the AI engineering team in an agile environment, balancing hands-on development with team leadership
• Design, build, and operate LLM-powered features on Amazon Bedrock, including RAG pipelines and agentic workflows
• Drive conversational search to general availability, including quality evaluation, latency, and cost
• Build dashboards on Amazon Redshift to measure AI feature usage and performance
• Shape the architecture for adaptive learning, rebuilding uPerform courses to adapt to each learner using AI
• Own technical decisions on model selection, retrieval design, evaluation, and cost-quality trade-offs
• Establish evaluation practices, including golden datasets, offline evals, and LLM-as-judge
• Provision resources with infrastructure as code (CloudFormation) and partner with operations on production deployments
• Drive adoption of AI coding tools such as Cursor and Claude Code across the team
• Contribute to agile team performance through planning, standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives

Required Skills:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years building generative AI features in production
• Hands-on production experience with Amazon Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry
• Experience building agentic systems, including tool use and multi-step workflows
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, and vector or hybrid search (OpenSearch or Elasticsearch)
• Demonstrated experience leading a team of 3–5+ engineers as a tech lead or lead engineer
• Strong Python skills and experience with AWS-native services (Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, Step Functions)
• Daily use of AI coding tools such as Cursor or Claude Code
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining AI concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working within Agile software methodologies

Preferred Skills:

• Healthcare or regulated-data experience (HIPAA, PHI, SOC 2)
• Experience building LLM evaluation frameworks and modeling cost per query
• Infrastructure as code with CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform
• Data warehousing and dashboarding on Redshift or Snowflake
• Edtech, learning platform, or adaptive learning background

Location:

Remote, United States (uPerform HQ in Elkridge, MD)