Senior AI Engineer – Innovation Lab

About the role

What we need:

they need to have done a lot of pocs/prototypes in their roles - ideally working for an AI lab where that is the brunt of their work. Good candidates I've screened have built around 15-20+ pocs/prototypes themselves

and then their github or example work has to be of a poc they’ve created so they can talk through that in an interview

This candidate needs to be strong communicator, very nerdy and passionate about AI and having came from a POC/LAB environment.

Senior AI Engineer – Innovation Lab

Location: Remote

Overview

Client’s Innovation Lab is seeking a highly experienced Senior AI Engineer to design, develop, and showcase cutting-edge AI prototypes, Proofs of Concept (POCs), and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). This team serves as an innovation hub supporting multiple business organizations, rapidly validating emerging technologies before transitioning successful solutions to engineering teams for production deployment.

This is an ideal opportunity for passionate AI builders who actively experiment with the latest technologies, contribute to open-source projects, participate in hackathons, and have a demonstrated history of transforming ideas into working solutions.

What You'll Do

Design, develop, and deliver AI-driven prototypes, POCs, and MVPs in a fast-paced innovation lab environment.

Evaluate emerging AI technologies and rapidly validate business use cases.

Build and demonstrate GenAI, agentic AI, and LLM-powered applications.

Partner with business stakeholders to turn concepts into working solutions.

Present prototypes and technical findings to business and technology leadership.

Create reusable frameworks and architectures that can be handed off to downstream engineering teams for scaling and production implementation.

Serve as a technical advisor, recommending next steps after successful proof-of-concept delivery.

Work across multiple concurrent innovation initiatives with minimal oversight.

Required Qualifications

8+ years of software engineering experience with strong Python development expertise.

Extensive experience building AI/ML solutions, GenAI applications, and large language model-based systems.

Proven track record developing 10+ prototypes, POCs, or MVPs utilizing emerging technologies.

Prior experience working in an Innovation Lab, R&D organization, incubator, accelerator, or prototyping-focused environment.

Hands-on experience with:

Python

OpenAI APIs

LangChain

Hugging Face

LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment

Experience building solutions on Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Strong understanding of AI development lifecycle from concept through prototype validation.

Excellent communication, presentation, and stakeholder engagement skills.

Ability to work independently and navigate ambiguity while driving innovation initiatives forward.

AI & Agentic Framework Expertise

Candidates should have hands-on experience with several of the following:

LangGraph

CrewAI

OpenAI Agents

Multi-Agent Systems

Agentic AI Workflows

Autonomous AI Architectures

Workflow Orchestration Frameworks

Multi-Modal AI Applications

Advanced Prompt Engineering

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Highly Preferred Qualifications

Active GitHub portfolio with public repositories demonstrating AI projects.

Participation in AI hackathons, competitions, research initiatives, or personal AI experimentation.

Experience working with the newest AI technologies and staying current on emerging trends.

Demonstrated passion for AI beyond day-to-day job responsibilities.

Experience building and showcasing innovative AI solutions that can be demonstrated during interviews.

Strong problem-solving skills and ability to rapidly prototype solutions.

What Makes a Candidate Stand Out

We are looking for builders, innovators, and technologists who actively create. Candidates who can showcase:

Active GitHub projects

AI side projects

Hackathon submissions

Agentic AI implementations

Multi-agent systems

Open-source contributions

Innovative proof-of-concepts

Working demonstrations of AI solutions

will receive strong consideration.