Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Strategic Staffing Solutions
St. Louis, Missouri, United StatesContractPosted Aug 26, 2026

About the role

Lead AI Engineer

Location: St. Louis. MO (Hybrid)

Duration: 12 Month Contract

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise AI solutions. You will help evolve our platform from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications to agentic AI systems that leverage reasoning, orchestration, tool use, and autonomous workflows.

You will work closely with platform engineers, architects, and business stakeholders to build scalable, reliable, and measurable AI solutions. A key part of the role is ensuring AI systems can be evaluated, monitored, and operated successfully in production.

What You Will Do

Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions.

Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines.

Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures.

Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability.

Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities.

Develop automated testing and regression validation processes.

Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise applications, and data sources. Design reusable AI patterns, frameworks, and components that increase platform scalability and team productivity.

Establish engineering best practices and contribute to code reviews.

Research and adopt emerging AI technologies where they provide business value.

Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into AI solutions

Required Skills:

5+ years of software engineering experience.

Proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade production software.

Strong Python development skills.

Experience building, deploying, and operating production AI systems.

Experience designing and implementing RAG solutions.

Experience with Databricks.

Hands-on experience with LangGraph or similar agent orchestration frameworks.

Experience building AI workflows that leverage tools, APIs, and external systems.

Experience with AI evaluation frameworks and quality measurement.

Experience implementing AI observability and tracing solutions.

Understanding of agent architecture patterns, prompt engineering, and LLM evaluation techniques.

Experience with AWS in production environments.

Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.

Experience with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.

Knowledge of secure coding principles and responsible AI practices.

Experience collaborating within Agile software development teams

Nice to Have:

Experience with AgentBricks.

Experience with Microsoft Copilot extensibility and agent development.

Experience with LangChain and related frameworks.

Experience with MCP integrations.

Experience with vector databases and semantic search.

Experience with AWS Bedrock.

Experience with OpenTelemetry, LangSmith, Grafana, MLflow, DeepEval, or similar tooling.

Experience deploying multi-agent systems.

Experience with Terraform.

AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, or AI-related certifications.

Mindset:

Delivers AI solutions that create measurable business value.

Treats evaluation and observability as first-class engineering disciplines.

Balances innovation with reliability, scalability, and governance.

Takes ownership of production systems and outcomes.

Thinks holistically about data, architecture, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

Collaborates effectively across technical and business teams.

Continuously learns and adapts to evolving AI technologies.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, deploy, and support production AI solutions
  • Develop agentic workflows, tool integrations, and orchestration pipelines
  • Build and evolve RAG and agent-based architectures
  • Create evaluation frameworks to improve quality, groundedness, and reliability
  • Implement AI observability, tracing, and monitoring capabilities
  • Develop automated testing and regression validation processes
  • Integrate AI solutions with APIs, enterprise applications, and data sources
  • Establish engineering best practices and contribute to code reviews

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience
  • Proven track record of delivering enterprise-grade production software
  • Strong Python development skills
  • Experience building, deploying, and operating production AI systems
  • Experience designing and implementing RAG solutions
  • Experience with Databricks
  • Hands-on experience with LangGraph or similar agent orchestration frameworks
  • Experience building AI workflows that leverage tools, APIs, and external systems

Skills mentioned

PythonGenerative AIRetrieval-Augmented GenerationAI AgentsLangGraphDatabricksAWSREST APIsCI/CDModel Monitoring

About Strategic Staffing Solutions

Strategic Staffing Solutions (S3) is a woman-owned, global IT consulting and business services corporation that delivers staff augmentation, managed services, total workforce management programs, and direct hire recruiting with industry expertise in financial services, energy and utilities, healthcare, and insurance. S3’s Consultants are placed with Customers throughout the U.S., Europe, and the Americas. Founded in Detroit, MI in 1990, S3 has reported consistent growth and profit every year and carries zero debt. Since 2000, it has donated more than $44 million to charities and community organizations around the world.

IT Services and IT Consulting1,001-5,000 employeesDetroit, MI