Lead AI Engineer - ML/LLM Ops & Agentic AI

Shift delivers AI agents that transform insurers' most critical work. By combining deep industry expertise and unmatched data resources, Shift provides proven results that have earned the trust of hundreds of the world's leading insurers. Our insurance-grade AI is accurate, explainable, and secure-empowering human experts to move with unmatched speed, total confidence, and a renewed focus on the people they serve.

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Our culture is built on innovation, trust, and a drive to transform the insurance industry through our SaaS platform. We come from more than 50 different countries and cultures and together we are creating the future of insurance.

Learn more at www.shift-technology.com

ABOUT THE ROLE

At Shift, we are building the next generation of AI-driven platform capabilities. We are looking for an experienced, hands-on Lead AI Engineer in our Data & AI Platform Engineering team to drive our LLMOps roadmap and our most business-critical agentic use cases; someone who is deeply passionate about building, prototyping, and scaling modern AI/LLM systems, while leading a small team.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a senior builder who excels at the intersection of cutting-edge AI technologies (Agentic frameworks, LLM orchestration, MCP, GenAI, MLOps) and production-grade software engineering. You will lead a focused team of engineers and work directly with software engineers and product leaders to design, prototype, and ship state-of-the-art AI systems into production, while acting as the link with our Data Science team to align priorities with their needs and spread best practices.

If you are a senior AI engineer looking for the next step in your career, where you can lead people and shape a roadmap without giving up hands-on coding and building, this role is for you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build agentic systems (hands-on): design and ship production-grade agentic workflows (LLM orchestration, tool calling, MCP, RAG, structured outputs), and define reference architectures that decide what a model handles and what deterministic code handles.
• Own LLMOps standards: evaluation harnesses, prompt and agent versioning, tracing (OpenTelemetry), cost and token governance, and release gates, with tenant-aware patterns that respect client data isolation.
• Evolve our ML platform: be the technical owner of our Databricks-based ML platform (Unity Catalog, MLflow, CI/CD to serving on AKS, monitoring), and extend it toward the agent and prompt lifecycle.
• Run & Serve Open-Weight Models: Partner closely with our Cloud Ops team to design and deploy the architecture required to self-host open-weight foundation models internally. You will own the inference layer and model optimizations (latency, throughput), while collaborating seamlessly with Cloud Ops on GPU resource provisioning and cluster management.  
• Push the frontier: run time-boxed POCs on emerging techniques, such as relational foundation models for claims fraud detection or agentic ingestion of medical billing sources to generate claim edits, with clear success criteria and a path to production.
• Lead and grow the team: coach and develop 2 to 5 people, raise the technical bar through design and code reviews, and partner with product, SMEs, architecture, security and SRE.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Agentic AI expertise: proven experience building production agentic systems (Microsoft Agent Framework, OpenAI Agents SDK, PydanticAI, LangGraph or custom), and strong command of tool calling, MCP, RAG and evaluation.
• MLOps and engineering: high proficiency in Python; hands-on experience with experiment tracking, model registry, serving and monitoring (ideally Databricks and MLflow); backend services on Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform and event-driven patterns.
• Applied ML curiosity: solid ML foundations, ability to judge new approaches critically; exposure to graph ML, fraud or claims data is a plus.
• Software design: high proficiency in Python and strong experience with OOP; proven ability to design robust, maintainable software systems and write clean code, applying the right design patterns and software engineering best practices.
• Leadership: experience leading technical initiatives across stakeholders, and coaching or managing technical contributors (or a clear motivation to do so).
• English fluency required; French is a plus.

HOW YOU WORK (Shift High-Impact Behaviors)

• Jump in and get things done: You are a proactive builder who loves turning ambitious ideas into working code. You don't wait for permission to solve hard problems.
• Make things simpler: You can break down complex AI concepts and architectures into clear, executable steps for engineers, data scientists, and non-technical partners alike.
• Test & learn new things: You are genuinely obsessed with the fast-moving AI landscape. You constantly experiment with new models, libraries, and papers, and know how to extract real product value from the hype.
• Communicate with impact & help others grow: You lead by example and collaboration, upskilling team members through pair programming, code reviews, and pragmatic design discussions.

RECRUITMENT PROCESS

• A first fit call with our Talent Acquisition Specialist
• A couple of interviews to test your leadership & technical skills
• A final round at our office with multiple interviews inc. with some of our co-founders

#LI-RH1 #LI-HYBRID 

To support our permanent, full time employees at every stage of their careers and lives, we provide a competitive total rewards and benefits package. Here are the global benefits we’d like to highlight:

• Flexible remote and hybrid working options
• Competitive Salary and a variable component tied to personal and company performance
• Multiple Learning and Development opportunities, including Focus Fridays, a half-day each month to focus on learning and personal growth
• Generous PTO and paid holidays
• Mental health benefits 
• 2 MAD Days per year (Make A Difference Days for paid volunteering)

Additional benefits may be offered by country, based on your eligibility - ask your recruiter for more information. Intern and Apprentice positions may receive some of these benefits - ask your recruiter for more details.

AI tools are used to help review applications for this role. Read our AI in Recruitment Notice for what the AI considers, how to request a human review, and our most recent bias audit.

At Shift we strive to be a diverse and inclusive workforce. We welcome applications from and hire people who will contribute to the diversity of our company, without regard to race, color, religion, marital status, age, national or ethnic origin, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other non-merit criteria. Shift Technology is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our application and employment process. Should you require accommodation, please email [email protected] and we will work with you to meet your accessibility needs.

Please be aware of scammers and only trust correspondence that comes from emails ending in "shift-technology.com". We will never do initial outreach to you via Whatsapp/Text/SMS, never ask for banking information or personal identification numbers (ex. Social Security Number) as part of our recruitment process.

Shift Technology does not accept unsolicited CVs from recruiters or employment agencies in response to the Shift Technology Careers page or a Shift Technology social media post. Any unsolicited CVs, including those submitted directly to hiring managers, are deemed to be the property of Shift Technology.