Ai Engineering Lead

Overview

ZS is a place where passion changes lives. As a management consulting and technology firm focused on improving life and how we live it, we transform ideas into impact by bringing together data, science, technology and human ingenuity to deliver better outcomes for all. Here you’ll work side-by-side with a powerful collective of thinkers and experts shaping life-changing solutions for patients, caregivers and consumers, worldwide.

ZSers drive impact by bringing a client-first mentality to each and every engagement. We partner collaboratively with our clients to develop custom solutions and technology products that create value and deliver company results across critical areas of their business. Bring your curiosity for learning, bold ideas, courage and passion to drive life-changing impact to ZS.

Engineering Lead

We are looking for a hands-on Engineering Lead with a proven track record of delivering large-scale, data-intensive products—most recently Generative AI-powered applications. You will guide a cross-functional squad of backend, frontend, data science, Dev Ops, and QA engineers, setting the technical vision, writing production code, and ensuring that our Agile processes translate business goals into reliable, secure, and scalable software.

What You’ll Do:

Technical & Product Leadership

• Own end‑to‑end architecture for Gen AI products—retrieval‑augmented generation, agent orchestration, guardrails, and responsible‑AI instrumentation.
• Make build‑vs‑buy decisions and select frameworks, libraries, and SDKs (Lang Graph, DSPy, etc.).
• Design event‑driven, microservices‑based systems (Python + FastAPI, Node/Type Script services) deployed to AWS/Azure/GCP.
• Champion Dev Sec Ops :
  IaC (Terraform), CI/CD (Git Hub Actions / Azure Dev Ops), container orchestration (Kubernetes, EKS/AKS/GKE), observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry).
• Remain 50–60 % hands‑on—writing clean, test‑driven code, reviewing MR/PRs, and tackling critical path items.

People & Process Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 3–5 engineers; set clear goals, provide regular feedback, and foster a culture of psychological safety and continuous learning.
• Translate OKRs and product roadmaps into quarterly technical plans and sprint‑level deliverables.
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies (backlog refinement, sprint planning, demos, retros) and drive empirical, data‑driven decision making.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Data Scientists to shape user‑centric features and measurable success criteria.
• Evangelize engineering excellence—secure coding, performance optimization, automated testing, privacy & compliance (HIPAA, GDPR).

What you’ll bring:

• 6+ years of professional software development, including 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• Expert‑level Python and solid Type Script/JavaScript; knowledge of Rust/Go preferred; deep knowledge of REST & gRPC APIs, Web Sockets, and JWT/OAuth2 identity flows (Azure AD preferred).
• Production experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI) and vector stores (pgvector, Qdrant) at scale.
• Proven success deploying cloud‑native systems on AWS/Azure/GCP—networking, IAM, autoscaling, managed databases (RDS/Redshift/), and serverless.
• Demonstrated mastery of modern Dev Ops tool chains:
  Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, or similar.
• Strong front‑end instincts (React/Next.js, Tailwind CSS) and appreciation for well‑designed UX.
• Deep familiarity with Agile/Scrum, CI/CD, trunk‑based development, and trunk‑based release strategies (feature flags, blue‑green, canary).
• Excellent verbal and written communication; able to convey complex technical ideas to engineers, PMs, and executive stakeholders alike.

Hybrid working model

ZS is committed to a Flexible and Connected way of working. ZSers are on-site at clients or ZS offices three days a week. Combined flexibility to work remotely two days a week is also available. The magic of ZS culture and innovation thrives in both planned and spontaneous face‑to‑face connections.

Perks & Benefits

ZS offers a comprehensive total rewards package…