Lead AI Engineer

About Crowe

At Crowe, you have the opportunity to build a meaningful and rewarding career. We prioritize flexibility in balancing work and life moments, entrusting you to deliver impactful results. We value your unique perspective, care for your well-being, and support your professional growth. Everyone has equal access to opportunities for career advancement and leadership. For over 80 years, delivering exceptional service through innovation has been fundamental to our culture across our audit, tax, and consulting groups. That’s why we continuously invest in innovative ideas, such as AI-enabled insights and technology-powered solutions, to elevate our services. Join us at Crowe and start a career where you can play a vital role in shaping the future of our industry.

About Crowe AI Transformation

Our mission focuses on making the future of human work more meaningful by harnessing cutting-edge technologies, modern architecture, and industry expertise to create AI-powered solutions that transform how our clients conduct business. The new AI Transformation team will expand Crowe's existing AI foundation, enhancing the capabilities of our Applied AI/Machine Learning team. By integrating Generative AI, Machine Learning, and Software Engineering, this team enables our clients to transform their business models through AI, no matter their current level of AI adoption. As a member of the AI Transformation team, you will help position Crowe as a leader in the marketplace and drive the firm's technology and innovation strategy. With AI powering the future, come build it with us.

About the Team

• Expertise Investment: You'll have the autonomy and support to dive deep into your projects and build lasting technical mastery. Collaborate with developers, product stakeholders, and project managers as a respected leader and domain expert.
• Commitment to Growth: Our team prioritizes professional development and shares knowledge consistently.
• Focus on Balance: Our distributed team culture is rooted in trust and flexibility, offering unlimited PTO, a flexible remote work policy, and a supportive environment that values sustainable, long-term performance.

About the Role

The Lead AI Engineer plays a pivotal role in designing, developing, and optimizing advanced AI and machine learning systems with a significant degree of autonomy. You will collaborate closely with architects, product leaders, and engineering teams to deliver end-to-end, cloud-native AI solutions that are scalable, secure, and production-ready. As a senior individual contributor, you will influence technical decision-making across data, model, and infrastructure layers, tackle complex engineering challenges, and establish technical standards that elevate team-wide engineering practices. This position blends deep hands-on expertise with mentorship, cross-team collaboration, and strategic contributions to roadmap planning. You will significantly impact the advancement of enterprise AI and generative AI capabilities while ensuring compliance with security, governance, and ethical AI standards.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement sophisticated AI/ML systems, pipelines, and model-serving architectures for enterprise workloads.
• Create reusable frameworks, libraries, and tools to streamline AI engineering across teams.
• Analyze large-scale datasets, model telemetry, and inference performance to refine optimization strategies.
• Architect distributed training, evaluation, and experimentation workflows to enhance model reliability and accuracy.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders to define technical requirements, solution approaches, and feasibility assessments.
• Provide technical leadership by conducting design reviews, code reviews, and mentoring junior and mid-level engineers.
• Implement advanced automated testing, including stress testing, bias detection, non-regression testing, and quality validation.
• Troubleshoot complex pipeline failures, infrastructure issues, and distributed system bottlenecks.
• Optimize performance throughout the model lifecycle, including data preprocessing, training, and inference.
• Document architectural decisions, engineering patterns, and best practices to enhance organizational knowledge.
• Contribute expert recommendations to AI roadmap planning and future capability development.
• Engage in incident response and provide operational support for deployed AI systems.
• Research and assess emerging AI, generative AI, and cloud technologies for enterprise applicability.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in AI/ML engineering or software engineering.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives or mentoring engineers.
• Deep proficiency in Python, modern ML frameworks, and cloud-native engineering practices.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, data pipelines, and model optimization techniques.
• Ability to lead technical designs and perform advanced debugging across complex systems.
• Excellent communication skills for cross-functional technical alignment.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for cross-functional planning and collaboration.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• Master's degree or equivalent advanced study in a relevant technical discipline.
• Cloud and AI certifications, including Azure or equivalent AWS/GCP certifications.
• Advanced hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Relevant experience with containerization (Docker), Kubernetes, and infrastructure automation (Terraform).
• Expertise with cloud ML platforms such as SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Azure ML.
• Hands-on experience with GPU and accelerator-based workloads and distributed training jobs.
• Solid knowledge of observability, monitoring, and performance tuning for AI systems.
• Advanced generative AI expertise, including fine-tuning transformer models using popular ML frameworks.
• Experience designing and deploying retrieval-augmented generation systems using vector databases.
• Experience building generative AI services with relevant frameworks.
• Experience integrating LLM APIs and familiarity with fine-tuning techniques.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for LLM quality, safety, and scalability.
• Proven ability to work independently and tackle complex, ambiguous challenges.

We expect our candidates to uphold Crowe's values of Care, Trust, Courage, and Stewardship. These values define our identity as an organization. We expect all individuals to act ethically and with integrity at all times. The application deadline for this role is 03/31/2026. In compliance with federal law, all hires will be required to verify their identity and eligibility to work in the United States and complete the necessary employment eligibility verification form upon hire. Crowe is currently not sponsoring work authorization. The wage range for this position reflects the diverse factors considered in compensation decisions, including skills, experience, certifications, and organizational needs. The disclosed range, $74,100.00 - $147,800.00 per year, is a reasonable estimate.

Our Benefits

Your exceptional experience starts at Crowe. We recognize that outstanding people drive our success and prioritize comprehensive total rewards packages. Explore what working at Crowe can offer you!

How You Can Grow

We nurture your talent in an inclusive culture valuing diversity. Regular meetings with your Career Coach will help guide your aspirations and career goals.

More About Crowe

Crowe is one of the largest public accounting, consulting, and technology firms in the United States, utilizing industry expertise to offer audit services to public and private entities while helping clients achieve their goals across tax, advisory, risk, and performance services. Crowe has received accolades from numerous organizations as one of the best places to work. As an independent member of Crowe Global, a network of over 200 independent firms across 130 countries, we serve clients worldwide. Crowe LLP provides equal employment opportunities and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetics, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. Crowe LLP does not accept unsolicited candidates or resumes from staffing agencies or third-party services at any time. Any unsolicited referrals will be considered the property of Crowe. Crowe will consider qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in accordance with applicable state and local laws. If you require assistance in navigating our website or completing your application, please visit our Applicant Assistance and Accommodations page.