Senior AI Engineer

Cushman & Wakefield is hiring a Senior AI Engineer to shape the technical direction of AI-powered, cloud-native software. This onsite role in Costa Mesa, CA gives you the opportunity to embed intelligence across enterprise products using trusted data, lead full-stack and platform engineering, and drive delivery consistency across multiple squads.

You will define how agentic workflows, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, and data-grounded reasoning work in production across the platform, while setting AI engineering standards that other teams and external delivery partners can follow.

What you’ll do

• Define multi-year architectural direction across full-stack systems, cloud platforms, and AI-driven products with an emphasis on scale, resilience, security, and global performance.
• Establish standards for agentic workflows, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, and data-grounded reasoning across enterprise platforms.
• Shape engineering roadmaps using development stacks such as TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, C#, React, Next.js, along with microservices and event-driven architectures.
• Guide solution design across:
  • Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, micro-frontends
  • Backend: Node.js, Python (FastAPI), Go, .NET Core, event-driven microservices
  • Cloud & Infra: Azure (preferred), AWS, Kubernetes (AKS/EKS), serverless architectures, Terraform
  • Data & AI: Databricks (Genie/AI-BI, Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, medallion architecture, model serving), Azure Data Lake, vector databases, LLM orchestration, agentic frameworks
  • APIs: GraphQL, gRPC, REST at scale
• Drive innovation by embedding AI/ML, automation, and production prompt engineering (system prompt architecture, context injection, business-rule encoding, citation and grounding patterns), plus intelligent workflows and data interoperability.
• Champion enterprise excellence across CI/CD and quality, including Azure DevOps and ArgoCD, automated testing, contract testing, and quality gates.
• Lead observability and reliability improvements using Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, New Relic, and Datadog.
• Promote secure-by-design approaches including threat modeling and zero trust patterns.
• Oversee engineering delivery across multiple squads to ensure consistency, velocity, and reliability.
• Define and enforce AI engineering standards across products and external teams, including:
  • AI evaluation framework design: golden-question sets, hallucination measurement, regression testing, and model quality gates
  • Pre-semantic data contracts: schema stability requirements, canonical entity ID definitions, and data quality thresholds
  • AI governance: access control patterns for confidential and client data, responsible use guardrails, and auditability for AI-generated outputs
  • LLM system design standards: prompt versioning, context window management, grounding and citation patterns, and failure-mode handling
• Lead architectural reviews and key design decisions across services, domains, and integrations.
• Maintain high standards in coding, cloud security, API governance, and data interoperability, partnering with Product, Architecture, Operations, and Client Technology to prioritize work and unblock teams.
• Represent engineering in executive and governance forums by translating complex technical tradeoffs into clear business insights.

What you bring

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading technical teams or engineering managers.
• Deep experience designing and shipping production LLM/AI systems, including agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, text-to-SQL grounding, and AI evaluation harnesses.
• Demonstrated expertise across full-stack development, cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, and high-scale platforms.
• Hands-on experience with Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, Java, SQL/NoSQL and React, Next.js, Node.js, FastAPI, .NET plus microservices and Kubernetes.
• Strong command of DevOps: CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability.
• Ability to mentor engineers, grow high-performing teams, and attract top talent.
• Comfort making architectural decisions that require both technical depth and business awareness, with the ability to influence product, business, and technical leadership.

Compensation & location

• Location: Costa Mesa, CA (onsite)
• Salary: USD 124,780 - 146,800 per year

Benefits

• Health, vision, and dental insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• Health savings accounts
• Retirement savings plans
• Life and disability insurance
• Paid and unpaid time away from work
• Competitive pay
• The company will not pay less than minimum wage for this role

Bonus experience (highly attractive)

• Distributed event streaming (Kafka, EventHub) and CQRS/event-sourcing patterns
• Experience building platforms used across global organizations
• Experience technically overseeing external development vendors or contract engineering teams