Lead, AI Engineering in Zürich

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About Bain AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS): Bain’s AI, Insights & Solutions (AIS) team works with clients to design and deliver AI-powered solutions that create measurable business impact. You’ll operate in multidisciplinary teams alongside Bain consultants, other experts in product, design, architecture and engineering, and client stakeholders, translating ambiguous business problems into robust AI applications that can be piloted, scaled, and adopted.

The Impact You’ll Have: Bain works with clients on board-level and executive priorities, helping deliver step-change results across growth, productivity, and resilience. In that context, AI is rarely a point solution. The most meaningful outcomes come from building AI as part of an integrated system that combines technology with redesigned processes, operating model changes, and adoption at scale across the organization.

The Role: As an AI Engineer in AIS, you will build the technical core of these transformations and work as part of broader Bain consulting teams to move solutions from prototype to real adoption. The Lead AI Engineer will design, build, and ship generative AI systems and agentic solutions for Bain’s clients. You will contribute across the full development lifecycle — from early experimentation and prototyping through to production deployment — collaborating closely with senior engineers, product managers, and data scientists.

What You’ll Do:

• Contribute to the design, development, and deployment of end-to-end generative AI systems, including multi-agent workflows and production-grade AI applications.
• Build and iterate on multi-component AI pipelines, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning and parameter-efficient tuning, embedding generation and optimization, and hybrid retrieval strategies.
• Implement reasoning, tool use, function calling, and orchestration across AI workflows.
• Build and maintain APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native deployments with attention to observability and reliability.
• Support and help build GenAIOps processes for automated testing, regression evaluation, latency monitoring, and continual improvement.
• Partner with global ethics teams to ensure alignment with Bain’s Responsible AI standards.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks covering hallucination rate, factual consistency, relevance, precision/recall, latency, throughput, and system-level performance.
• Contribute technical insights and communicate findings clearly to cross-functional stakeholders and clients.

What We’re Looking For:

• 3–5+ years in software engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles with hands-on building responsibilities.
• German language proficiency at C1 level or higher.
• Demonstrated experience shipping generative AI features or systems end-to-end, from prototyping through production.
• Clear communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical collaborators and stakeholders.
• Solid prompt engineering and context engineering skills; familiarity with conversation design principles.
• Experience with RAG architectures, agentic patterns, and AI-specific tools & frameworks.
• Strong background in system design, architecture, and production-grade deployment.
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity environments with collaborative cross-functional teams.
• Experience in client-facing consulting or enterprise transformation environments is a strong plus.

This role requires a minimum of three days per week working together in person, either at a client location or at your Bain home office. Travel is required beyond your home office / primary working location. Frequency and destination vary by project needs.