Senior AI Engineer

Drive AI strategy end to end for Cushman & Wakefield, shaping how intelligence is embedded across cloud-native products using enterprise data. This onsite role in Costa Mesa, CA pairs technical leadership with architecture ownership across full-stack systems, AI agentic workflows, and enterprise platforms.

You will define multi-year direction, establish AI and engineering standards, and oversee delivery across multiple squads, ensuring consistency, velocity, and reliability. The scope spans modern web experiences, production-grade AI/LLM systems, and secure, observable cloud infrastructure.

What you’ll do

• Set architectural direction across full-stack systems, cloud platforms, and AI-driven products with a focus on scale, resilience, security, and global performance.
• Create standards for agentic workflows, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, and data-grounded reasoning across enterprise platforms.
• Shape engineering roadmaps using best-in-class stacks including TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, C#, React, Next.js, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Guide solution design across:
  • Frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, micro-frontends
  • Backend: Node.js, Python (FastAPI), Go, .NET Core, event-driven microservices
  • Cloud & Infra: Azure (preferred), AWS, Kubernetes (AKS/EKS), serverless architectures, Terraform
  • Data & AI: Databricks (Genie/AI-BI, Mosaic AI Agent Framework, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, medallion architecture, model serving), Azure Data Lake, vector databases, LLM orchestration, agentic frameworks
  • APIs: GraphQL, gRPC, REST at scale
• Embed AI/ML and automation into core products, including production prompt engineering (system prompt architecture, context injection, business-rule encoding, citation and grounding patterns) and data interoperability.
• Champion engineering excellence through enterprise CI/CD (Azure DevOps, ArgoCD), automated testing, contract testing, and quality gates.
• Lead observability and operational rigor with Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana and services like New Relic and Datadog.
• Apply secure-by-design practices, including threat modeling and zero trust patterns.
• Oversee delivery across squads and perform architectural reviews to align services, domains, and integrations.
• Define AI engineering standards for production systems, including:
  • AI evaluation framework design (golden-question sets, hallucination measurement, regression testing, and model quality gates)
  • Pre-semantic data contracts (schema stability, canonical entity IDs, and data quality thresholds)
  • AI governance (access control patterns, responsible-use guardrails, auditability for AI outputs)
  • LLM system design standards (prompt versioning, context window management, grounding and citation patterns, failure-mode handling)
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Operations, and Client Technology to prioritize work, unblock teams, and drive outcomes.
• Represent engineering in executive and governance forums, translating complex tradeoffs into business insights.

What you bring

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading technical teams or serving as an engineering manager.
• Deep experience in full-stack development, cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, and high-scale platforms.
• Proven experience designing and shipping production LLM/AI systems, including agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, text-to-SQL grounding, and AI evaluation harnesses.
• Hands-on expertise with Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, Java, SQL/NoSQL and strong front-end/backend experience with React, Next.js, Node.js, FastAPI, .NET and microservices and Kubernetes.
• Strong command of DevOps, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability.
• Ability to mentor engineers, grow teams, and influence product, business, and technical leadership.
• Comfort making architecture decisions that balance technical depth with business awareness.

Benefits

• Health, vision, and dental insurance
• Flexible spending accounts
• Health savings accounts
• Retirement savings plans
• Life and disability insurance
• Paid and unpaid time away from work
• Competitive pay
• The company will not pay less than minimum wage for this role

Bonus experience (highly attractive)

• Distributed event streaming (Kafka, EventHub), CQRS/event-sourcing patterns
• Experience building platforms used across global organizations
• Experience technically overseeing external development vendors or contract engineering teams

Compensation: USD 124,780 - 146,800 per year

Location: Costa Mesa, CA (onsite)