AI Engineering Team Lead
Location: Halifax, NS (Hybrid)
Job Type: Full-Time, Permanent
Our client is seeking an experienced AI Engineering Team Lead to lead the design, development, and support of secure, cloud-native, AI-enabled applications within a highly regulated enterprise environment.
As a key member of the technology organization, you will lead a cross-functional team responsible for delivering machine learning, generative AI, document intelligence, and intelligent automation solutions. This role combines people leadership, technical strategy, hands-on engineering oversight, and stakeholder engagement to drive the adoption of AI across the business.
You will be responsible for establishing technical direction, engineering standards, delivery practices, and governance frameworks while partnering with business leaders to identify opportunities for AI-driven transformation and operational efficiency.
Responsibilities
Team Leadership
- Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing AI Engineering team through coaching, hiring, and capability development.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence.
- Support career development and provide ongoing performance feedback and mentorship.
Technical Leadership
- Guide the design, development, and deployment of cloud-native, machine learning, and generative AI solutions in production environments.
- Define engineering standards, architecture patterns, and implementation best practices.
- Partner with architects and senior engineering leaders on AI services, machine learning platforms, agent-based workflows, data pipelines, and application integrations.
- Ensure appropriate selection of AI technologies, frameworks, models, and cloud services based on business and operational requirements.
Business Partnership
- Collaborate closely with stakeholders to identify automation opportunities and prioritize AI initiatives with measurable business value.
- Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions and long-term AI roadmaps.
- Communicate delivery progress, risks, priorities, and trade-offs to senior leadership.
Document Intelligence & AI Solutions
- Define and lead the roadmap for document intelligence and intelligent automation initiatives.
- Oversee development of solutions involving:
- Document classification
- Information extraction
- Workflow automation
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- AI-assisted operational processes
- Intelligent document processing
AI Governance & Quality
- Establish governance practices for model evaluation, monitoring, testing, fine-tuning, responsible AI, and production risk management.
- Ensure solutions are secure, observable, scalable, and production-ready.
- Define standards for model validation, prompt evaluation, regression testing, drift detection, monitoring, and operational support.
- Promote responsible use of AI tools and AI-assisted development practices while maintaining human review and approval processes.
Delivery & Operations
- Lead agile delivery activities including sprint planning, capacity management, prioritization, and execution.
- Manage dependencies, risks, and delivery commitments across multiple initiatives.
- Support incident management, root cause analysis, post-mortems, and continuous improvement activities.
- Ensure solutions meet performance, reliability, security, and operational support requirements.
Innovation
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, tools, and platforms.
- Recommend adoption strategies while balancing quality, security, governance, scalability, and cost considerations.
- Support the development of enterprise AI capabilities and long-term innovation initiatives.
Qualifications
Required Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related discipline.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong expertise in Python development.
- Experience leading engineering teams delivering AI, machine learning, NLP, intelligent automation, or cloud-native solutions in production environments.
- Proven people management experience, including hiring, coaching, mentoring, and team development.
- Experience working directly with business stakeholders to identify and deliver AI-driven solutions.
Technical Expertise
- Strong understanding of:
- Generative AI
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Intelligent Document Processing
- AI Governance
- MLOps and Model Lifecycle Management
- Software Quality and DevOps Practices
- Hands-on experience with technologies such as:
- Python
- LangChain
- LlamaIndex
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- Scikit-Learn
- SQL and NoSQL databases
- Vector databases
- Cloud-native application architectures
Cloud Platforms
- Experience with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or similar public cloud platforms.
- Experience with AI platforms such as:
- Amazon Bedrock
- Azure OpenAI
- Azure AI Services
- Azure Machine Learning
- Anthropic APIs
- Comparable foundation model platforms
Leadership Skills
- Experience leading agile delivery teams and managing competing priorities.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
- Ability to balance business outcomes, engineering quality, operational risk, and delivery timelines.
- Experience defining technical strategy, roadmaps, and governance standards.
Preferred Experience
- Financial services, fintech, banking, insurance, or other regulated industries.
- Experience with document intelligence and enterprise automation platforms.
- Experience developing AI strategies involving LLMs, retrieval systems, model fine-tuning, and intelligent automation.
- Experience implementing AI evaluation frameworks, monitoring solutions, safety controls, and governance processes.
What You'll Bring
- Strong technical leadership and problem-solving skills.
- A passion for building and growing engineering teams.
- Deep interest in AI innovation and emerging technologies.
- The ability to drive strategic initiatives while remaining focused on quality, security, and business value.
- A collaborative approach with a strong focus on mentorship, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Salary - $150,000 - $175,000
This posting is for an existing vacancy with the organization.
AI may be used to screen, assess or select applicants for the position.
