Lead AI Engineer - ML/LLM Ops & Agentic AI

<div class=&quot;content-intro&quot;><p><span style=&quot;font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;&quot;>Shift delivers AI agents that transform insurers&#39; 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&#39;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.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><video poster=&quot;https://8595762.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/8595762/2026%20Website%20Refresh/2026%20Shift%20Brand%20Video/thumbnail-violet.jpg&quot; controls=&quot;controls&quot; width=&quot;300&quot; height=&quot;150&quot;> &nbsp;&nbsp;<source src=&quot;https://8595762.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/8595762/2026%20Website%20Refresh/2026%20Shift%20Brand%20Video/2026%20Shift%20Brand%20Video%20(English).mp4&quot; type=&quot;video/mp4&quot;> &nbsp;&nbsp;Your browser does not support the video tag.</video></p> <p><span style=&quot;font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;&quot;>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.</span></p> <p><span style=&quot;font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;&quot;>Learn more at <a href=&quot;http://www.shift-technology.com&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;>www.shift-technology.com</a></span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p></div><h3><strong>ABOUT THE ROLE</strong></h3> <p>At Shift, we are building the next generation of AI-driven platform capabilities. We are looking for an experienced, hands-on <strong>Lead AI Engineer</strong> in our Data &amp; 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.</p> <p>This is a high-impact, high-visibility role for a senior builder who excels at the intersection of <strong>cutting-edge AI technologies</strong> (Agentic frameworks, LLM orchestration, MCP, GenAI, MLOps) and <strong>production-grade software engineering</strong>. 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.</p> <p>If you are a senior AI engineer looking for the next step in your career, where you can lead people and shape a roadmap <strong>without giving up hands-on coding and building</strong>, this role is for you.</p> <h3>&nbsp;</h3> <h3><strong>WHAT YOU&#39;LL DO</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Build agentic systems (hands-on):</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Own LLMOps standards:</strong> evaluation harnesses, prompt and agent versioning, tracing (OpenTelemetry), cost and token governance, and release gates, with tenant-aware patterns that respect client data isolation.</li> <li><strong>Evolve our ML platform:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Run &amp; Serve Open-Weight Models:</strong> 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.&nbsp;&nbsp;</li> <li><strong>Push the frontier:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Lead and grow the team:</strong> 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.</li> </ul> <h3>&nbsp;</h3> <h3><strong>WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Agentic AI expertise:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>MLOps and engineering:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Applied ML curiosity:</strong> solid ML foundations, ability to judge new approaches critically; exposure to graph ML, fraud or claims data is a plus.</li> <li><strong>Software design:</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Leadership:</strong> experience leading technical initiatives across stakeholders, and coaching or managing technical contributors (or a clear motivation to do so).</li> <li><strong>English</strong> fluency required; French is a plus.</li> </ul> <h3>&nbsp;</h3> <h3><strong>HOW YOU WORK (Shift High-Impact Behaviors)</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Jump in and get things done:</strong…