Lead AI Engineer

Piper Companies is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to support a rapidly growing organization in the insurance technology industry. The Lead AI Engineer role is ideal for an engineer who combines strong full stack development experience with hands-on work delivering real-world Generative AI solutions in production. The Lead AI Engineer role requires you to sit on site 3 days per week in Durham, NC.

Responsibilities of the Lead AI Engineer:

• Partner with technology leadership to stand up and scale a new AI-focused group, from defining use cases through launch of production solutions.
• Design and implement end-to-end AI features, including data pipelines, MCP/RAG workflows, model training/testing, and deployment into web and mobile applications.
• Embed Generative AI and, over time, agentic capabilities into existing digital customer and employee experiences.
• Collaborate with product, data, security, and engineering teams to ensure AI solutions are robust, secure, and aligned with business goals.

Requirements of the Lead AI Engineer:

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or related field is required
• 3–5 years of full stack engineering experience, ideally with JavaScript/TypeScript, modern web frameworks, and AWS cloud services.
• 1–2 years of deep, hands-on AI experience, having moved into AI-focused roles or projects delivering LLM/Generative AI solutions.
• Practical experience setting up data pipelines, implementing MCP/RAG architectures, and integrating Generative AI into mobile and web experiences that have shipped to production.
• Background spanning architecture design, data onboarding, training and evaluation of models, and deployment of scalable APIs and front-end integrations.
• Strong communication skills, ability to translate requirements into technical designs, and comfort working in a fast-paced, product-driven environment.

Compensation for the Lead AI Engineer:

• $155,000 - $195,000 base salary
• Full Comprehensive Benefits: Health, Vision, Dental, PTO, Paid Holiday and Sick Leave if Required by Law.

Keywords: lead ai engineer, full stack javascript, typescript, aws, generative ai, large language models, llm, mcp, rag, data pipelines, mobile ai, web ai, agentic ai, production ai, insurance technology, insurtech, architecture, api integration, durham nc, hybrid

This job opens for applications on 2/3/2026. Applications for this job will be accepted for at least 30 days from the posting date.

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