Lead AI Engineer

Sweet James is hiring a Lead AI Engineer (player-coach) to own its in-house AI platform’s direction, standards, and operational health while leading the engineering team.

• Own AI platform architecture across document intake and filing, fact extraction, case search, the internal assistant and its agents, and voice agents
• Review major designs before implementation to ensure platform standards are met
• Translate roadmap into delivery by deciding how priorities set by the Chief Technology Officer and product leadership get built
• Define the shipping process, including code review, testing, and AI evaluation sets required for release
• Own uptime and reliability with monitoring, incident response, and access controls across the platform
• Ensure operational resilience so no single person is a dependency for critical systems
• Lead through coaching and engineering execution: allocate team capacity to CTO priorities, manage trade-offs when demand exceeds capacity, and coach, review, and hire engineers
• Ship production code weekly as an active player on the team
• Partner with legal, case management, and operations to decide what to automate next
• Measure automation outcomes using hours returned, error rates, and adoption
• Set access and compliance controls including least-privilege access, audit trails, and rules for which client and medical data may reach which model

Requirements

• 8+ years building production software
• Technical leadership track record as a technical lead on systems other engineers depended on
• Leadership experience through mentoring, design review, and ownership of team output (formal people management welcome but not required)
• LLM production craft delivering systems to real users across prompt and tool design, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and cost and latency tuning
• Production engineering stack: Python; TypeScript/Node; production SQL in Postgres; Docker; containerized cloud services (Azure preferred); CI/CD; monitoring
• Operations ownership, including on-call, incident reviews, and rollbacks
• Clear communication via design docs, runbooks, and plain-language explanations for non-engineers

Technologies

• Python
• TypeScript
• Node
• Postgres
• Docker
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Monitoring

Preferred

• Anthropic Claude and OpenAI APIs at production scale
• Agent frameworks or Model Context Protocol
• Vector search (e.g., pgvector)
• Self-hosted or open-weight models (e.g., vLLM, Baseten)
• Platforms such as n8n
• Salesforce: data model and APIs (Litify is a plus)
• Voice AI and telephony (e.g., Retell, Twilio, Zoom)
• Experience in legal, insurance, or healthcare

Benefits

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Job Details

• Location: Sweet James Headquarters, Newport Beach, CA (on-site)
• Team: Technology
• Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
• Compensation: USD 200,000 - 250,000 base salary (depending on experience)
• Work location: In person