Lead AI Engineer

Sweet James is building an in-house AI platform that goes to production with real users every week. This player-coach role partners closely with technology leadership to set architecture standards, ensure reliability, and lead the engineers who ship. You will also shape what gets automated next with attorneys, case managers, and operations, with measurable results like hours returned, error rates, and adoption.

Location: Sweet James Headquarters, Newport Beach, CA (onsite, in person).
Compensation: USD 200,000 - 250,000 base salary, depending on experience.
Reports to: Chief Technology Officer.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI platform architecture, including document intake and filing, fact extraction, case search, the internal assistant and its agents, and voice agents, and review major designs before implementation.
• Translate the CTO and product leadership roadmap into execution plans and delivery priorities.
• Define the team’s shipping practices, including code review, testing, and evaluation sets that every AI feature must meet before release.
• Own uptime, monitoring, incident response, and access controls across the platform, with guardrails to ensure no system depends on one person.
• Allocate engineering capacity against CTO-set priorities, make trade-offs when demand exceeds capacity, and coach, review, and help hire engineers.
• Ship production code yourself on a weekly cadence.
• Work with attorneys, case managers, and operations leaders to select automation opportunities, and report outcomes in hours returned, error rates, and adoption.
• Set least-privilege access rules, audit trails, and data routing rules so client and medical data reach only the appropriate models.

Requirements

• 8+ years building production software, including a track record as technical lead on systems other engineers depended on.
• Leadership experience through mentoring, design review, and ownership of a team’s output (formal people management is welcome but not required).
• Practical LLM experience shipping systems to real users, covering prompt and tool design, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and cost and latency tuning.
• Strong production engineering skills: Python and TypeScript/Node, production SQL in Postgres, Docker, containerized cloud services (preferred Azure), CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Operations ownership, including on-call responsibilities, incident reviews, and rollbacks.
• Clear communication skills through design docs, runbooks, and plain-language explanations for non-engineers.

Benefits

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Preferred

• Production-scale experience with Anthropic Claude and OpenAI APIs, agent frameworks or the Model Context Protocol, vector search (for example pgvector), and self-hosted or open-weight models (for example vLLM, Baseten).
• Experience with workflow tools such as n8n.
• Salesforce data model and APIs (Litify is a plus).
• Voice AI and telephony experience (for example Retell, Twilio, Zoom).
• Experience in legal, insurance, or healthcare.

Tech

Python, TypeScript, Node, Postgres, Docker, Azure, CI/CD, monitoring.