Lead AI Engineer

Piper Companies is seeking a Senior AI Engineer Lead to join a prominent technology organization is to launch and scale a new AI solutions for business operations and customer experiences. The Senior AI Engineering Lead will sit hybrid in Durham, NC.

Responsibilities of the Senior AI Engineering Lead include:

• Partnering with the CTO to stand up the Emerging Intelligence Group and deliver early strategic wins.
• Building and deploying LLM‑powered applications, RAG pipelines, and scalable APIs.
• Integrating AI capabilities across web, mobile, and enterprise systems in collaboration with Product Engineering.
• Establishing AI governance and serving as the technical bridge between data, engineering, and product teams.
  
  

Qualifications for the Senior AI Engineering Lead include:

• 8 years of experience across software engineering and AI product development, with proven delivery of production AI systems.
• Hands‑on experience with LLMs, RAG architectures, vector databases, and frameworks like LangChain or Hugging Face.
• Strong proficiency in AWS (Bedrock, Lambda, S3), full‑stack development, and SQL/NoSQL platforms.
• Skilled communicator with familiarity in MLOps, responsible AI principles, and conversational UX.
  
  

Compensation for the Senior AI Engineering Lead includes:

• $140,000 – $170,000 annually.
• Comprehensive benefits package including Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k), and PTO.
• Paid holidays and sick leave as required by law.
• Hybrid in Durham, NC.
  
  

This job opens for applications on 2/27/2026. Applications for this role will be accepted for at least 30 days from the posting date.

Keywords: LLM, Large Language Models, Generative AI, Agentic AI, RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Vector Databases, Embeddings, Transformers, LangChain, Hugging Face, LlamaIndex, GPT, Claude, Llama, AI Governance, Responsible AI, Conversational AI, AWS, AWS Bedrock, AWS Lambda, S3, Cloud Architecture, Serverless, CI/CD, MLOps, Model Deployment, Full-Stack Development