AI Lead

Job Title: AI Lead Developer (Generative AI / Agentic AI) Client Name: Sopre Steria / Airbus Office location: Herndon, US, Hybrid (minimum 3 days/week onsite) Duration: ASAP, Minimum 6 months Possibility of Extension: Highly likely Seniority: Senior / Lead (hands-on technical lead) Description Role Objective Drive the design, development, and industrialization of Generative AI and Agentic AI solutions in a global, high-tech enterprise setting. This role owns the journey from PoC → MVP → production with enterprise-grade quality: security, scalability, reliability, observability, and governance. Candidates must be platform-agnostic; hands-on Google Cloud Platform experience is preferred. Familiarity with classical AI/ML for hybrid solutions is a strong advantage. Key Responsibilities • Technical Leadership & Architecture o Define solution architecture for GenAI/agentic capabilities (RAG, tool/function calling, orchestration, guardrails).o Make design decisions balancing quality, latency, cost, and compliance; produce lightweight architecture artifacts and decision logs. • Hands-on Delivery (Prototype to Production) o Build and deploy production-ready GenAI services/APIs (microservices) and reusable components (accelerators, templates, SDKs).o Implement data ingestion + retrieval pipelines (chunking, embeddings, indexing) and integrate enterprise data sources.o Establish evaluation approach (benchmarks, regression tests, golden datasets) and manage prompt/model versioning. • LLM Ops / Platform Enablement o Implement CI/CD, automated testing gates, rollout strategies, monitoring/logging/tracing, and operational runbooks.o Support incident/change workflows and ensure production readiness (SLOs, resiliency, cost controls). • Security, Privacy & Responsible AI o Implement controls for PII protection, access management, auditability, prompt-injection mitigation, safety filters, and governance alignment. • Collaboration & Mentoring o Partner with product, architecture, data, and security stakeholders; translate requirements into backlog and deliverables.o Mentor engineers and align distributed/global teams on standards and delivery practices. Required Skills & Experience • 8+ years software engineering; 2+ years delivering GenAI/LLM solutions (hands-on). • Demonstrated success taking at least one GenAI solution into production (not only PoCs). • Strong coding in Python (and/or Java/Go/TypeScript) plus API/service engineering. • Strong GenAI fundamentals: RAG, embeddings, prompt lifecycle, tool/function calling, agentic patterns, evaluation methods. • Cloud-native engineering: containers, Kubernetes (or equivalent), CI/CD, IaC, observability. • Ability to work onsite in Herndon ≥3 days/week. Preferred / Nice to Have • Hands-on GCP (e.g., Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Run/GKE, Pub/Sub, IAM/Secret Manager). • Classical AI/ML exposure for hybrid systems (prediction + GenAI). • Experience with vector DB / enterprise search and working in regulated/high-security environments. Deliverables • Production-grade GenAI/agentic service(s) with monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and support readiness. • Reference architecture + reusable components and quality gates (evaluation, security, performance, cost). • Secure integration with enterprise data and identity/access controls.