Technical Lead, Software Development, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software)

Key Bank is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and modernize AI-powered conversational experiences, IVR platforms, and Voice Bot solutions within the Contact Center Technology organization. This role serves as a senior hands-on engineer responsible for architecting, developing, and delivering AI-driven solutions that enhance customer self-service and agent experiences.

Unlike a traditional technical lead role, this position is deeply focused on hands-on AI engineering and solution delivery. The Lead AI Engineer will spend the majority of their time designing, building, coding, integrating, and optimizing AI-powered applications while providing technical guidance across initiatives.

The Lead AI Engineer partners closely with product, platform, voice, and operations teams to deliver secure, scalable, and highly reliable conversational AI solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This is a senior individual contributor role with delivery accountability, but no people management responsibility.

Design and develop AI-powered IVR and voice bot solutions leveraging modern conversational AI frameworks.

Lead the technical architecture, engineering design, and implementation of AI-driven customer experience initiatives.

Build and develop Node.js / Type Script microservices aligned to cloud-native and low-latency voice requirements.

Own end-to-end delivery of complex AI features, from concept and design through deployment and production support.

Apply agentic AI patterns utilizing Gemini, Lang Graph, Lang Chain, and emerging AI frameworks to enhance conversational experiences.

Develop, test, evaluate, and optimize prompts, workflows, and AI orchestration strategies.

Collaborate across the contact center technology ecosystem to support call routing, self-service, and agent handoff scenarios.

Provide technical mentorship and code review support while contributing directly to development efforts.

Establish engineering best practices for AI solution development, testing, deployment, and observability.

Apply SRE principles to ensure resiliency, scalability, monitoring, and production readiness.

Ensure solutions comply with security and regulatory requirements (PII / PCI).

4+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years as a Lead AI Engineer, Lead Engineer, Principal Engineer, or comparable senior technical contributor role.

Strong hands-on experience building and deploying AI-powered applications and services.

Strong, hands-on experience with Node.js / Type Script.

Proven experience designing and delivering cloud-native solutions on GCP.

Experience implementing and integrating LLMs, conversational AI platforms, and agentic AI frameworks.

Solid understanding of microservices architecture, APIs, and distributed systems.

Hands-on Kubernetes experience, including GKE cluster setup and platform operations.

Experience with IVR, voice bots, conversational AI, or contact center technologies.

Strong collaboration skills across engineering, product, and operations teams.

Excellent technical judgment, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Experience with conversational AI and agentic frameworks (Gemini, Lang Graph, Lang Chain).

Experience developing AI agents, orchestration workflows, and multi-agent solutions.

Knowledge of voice flows, call routing, containment, and agent escalation.

Experience working in regulated or financial services environments.

Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and Infrastructure as Code.

Experience working in Agile delivery models at enterprise scale.

Demonstrated experience with Agentic "Vibe Coding" — rapid prototyping and iterative development using AI-assisted coding tools, prompts, and agent-driven workflows.

This position is NOT eligible for employment visa sponsorship for non-U.S. citizens.

This position is eligible to earn a base salary in the range of $96,000.00 - $ annually. Placement within the pay range may differ based upon various factors, including but not limited to skills, experience and geographic location. Compensation for this role also includes…