Lead AI Engineer

Company Profile

Blackstraw.ai is an end-to-end technology services company specializing in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Engineering solutions across Data Science, Data Engineering, LLM/GenAI and LLMOps. Founded in 2018, we help global enterprises across North America, Europe and Asia to build and operationalize AI systems that create measurable business impact. Our mission is to make AI adoption simpler, faster and scalable through a blend of deep domain expertise, reusable accelerators and proven engineering practices.

With a 400+ strong team of engineers, data scientists and AI specialists, we partner with organizations to deliver real-world outcomes in areas such as predictive analytics, computer vision, natural language processing and Generative AI. Headquartered in Florida (USA) with operations in Canada and India, Blackstraw.ai continues to empower global enterprises to unlock the true potential of AI.

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly capable Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and scale enterprise-grade agentic AI systems that operate reliably in production environments.

This role requires strong hands-on expertise in agent orchestration, distributed systems, LLM application engineering, retrieval architectures, and production AI delivery. The ideal candidate is not only technically strong, but also able to lead implementation decisions, guide engineers, and translate evolving business problems into robust AI systems.

You will work closely with product teams, data scientists, platform engineers, and business stakeholders to architect intelligent agent workflows, memory-aware reasoning systems, tool-driven execution pipelines, and cloud-ready AI platforms.

Required Experience & Expertise

Professional Experience

• 8+ years of industry experience in AI/ML and Intelligent systems development
• Proven experience delivering AI or ML solutions in large-scale or enterprise environments
• Strong understanding of Agentic AI architectures, including both neural-based and symbolic agents

• Hands-on experience building multi-agent systems, including:
• Agent collaboration and coordination
• Reinforcement learning or feedback-driven optimization
• Dynamic or flexible workflows
• State, caching, and memory management
• Experience with one or more agentic AI frameworks, such as:
• LangGraph / LangChain
• CrewAI
• Semantic Kernel
• AutoGen or equivalent frameworks

Programming & ML

• Strong proficiency in Python for building scalable, production-grade systems
• Experienced or foundational knowledge in machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, or AutoML tools
• Solid understanding of model lifecycle management, including training, evaluation, and deployment

Prompt Engineering & LLMs

• Practical experience with prompt engineering techniques, including:
• Zero-shot and few-shot prompting
• Chain-of-thought and structured reasoning
• Prompt iteration and optimization
• Experience building LLM-based applications, including tool use and function calling

IR / RAG & Knowledge Systems

• Experience designing and implementing Information Retrieval (IR) and RAG systems
• Hands-on work with vector databases, embeddings, and optionally knowledge graphs
• Familiarity with hybrid search approaches (vector + lexical + metadata-based retrieval)

Model Evaluation

• Experience evaluating AI systems using quantitative and qualitative metrics
• Familiarity with A/B testing, benchmarking, and performance analysis of LLMs and prompts

Technical Skills

• Programming Languages: Python (required)
• Agentic AI: LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, OpenAI Agent SDK, or similar
• Generative AI: LLMs, RAG architectures, NLP pipelines
• Cloud Platforms: Experience with at least one major cloud provider (e.g., Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS); ability to design cloud-agnostic architectures
• Version Control: Git / GitHub
• Development Practices: Model testing, validation, CI/CD awareness
• Collaboration: Experience working in Agile / Scrum teams

Blackstraw provides equal employment opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis as protected by federal, state, or local law