Purpose of the Role

The AI Lead is a senior technical leadership role responsible for driving the end-to-end delivery of AI and Agentic AI solutions. You will own the technical direction of AI projects, lead a team of AI Engineers, and serve as the bridge between business stakeholders, solution architects, and engineering teams. You are accountable for solution quality, delivery cadence, and production readiness of AI workloads.

Key Accountabilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

Own the technical delivery of AI solutions from ideation through to production deployment
Define and enforce solution architecture patterns including single-agent, multi-agent, and orchestration topologies
Make technology selection decisions with cost, performance, and maintainability trade-offs
Design and approve prompt architectures, retrieval strategies, and context assembly patterns
Establish reference architectures and reusable design patterns for the AI engineering team

Delivery Management

Lead AI projects through a stage-gated delivery model: Ideation Framing Design Build Test UAT Production
Own design approval gates and ensure every deliverable meets agreed quality bars before stage exit
Manage non-functional requirements (latency, cost-per-task, throughput) and ensure they are met at each gate
Drive parallel workstreams (e.g., systems data readiness alongside agent build) to prevent schedule slip
Coordinate cross-team dependencies with platform, MLOps, data, and business teams

Team Leadership

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of AI Engineers across agent development, prompt engineering, and LLM integration
Conduct code reviews and AI engineering quality checks
Establish and enforce development standards, coding guidelines, and engineering best practices
Foster a culture of experimentation, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing
Manage team capacity, sprint planning, and delivery commitments

Agentic AI & LLM Expertise

Design and oversee agentic orchestration solutions (multi-agent systems, state management, human-in-the-loop patterns)
Lead prompt engineering strategy including system prompt design, few-shot patterns, chain-of-thought reasoning, and prompt versioning
Architect Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines including chunking strategies, embedding models, and retrieval quality evaluation
Drive evaluation harness design: golden-set creation, grading rubrics, pass-bar thresholds, and CI-integrated eval suites
Ensure non-determinism is managed through stable eval scores across consecutive runs

Security & Governance

Ensure all AI solutions follow zero-trust security principles: managed identities, no secrets in code, defence in depth
Integrate content safety checks on all LLM inputs and outputs
Design and enforce guardrails for agent actions including blast-radius assessment and fallback paths
Own adversarial testing strategy: prompt injection, jailbreak, and tool-misuse test packs
Contribute to governance frameworks including model cards, explainability documentation, and audit evidence

Stakeholder Engagement

Translate business requirements into feasible AI solution designs
Present architecture decisions, PoC findings, and delivery progress to senior stakeholders
Collaborate with business SMEs on use-case framing, autonomy-level decisions, and acceptance criteria
Participate in joint go/no-go gates for production deployment

Observability & Operations

Define observability and trace design requirements for AI workloads (logging, telemetry, cost tracking)
Establish alert thresholds, on-call procedures, and hypercare plans for production AI systems
Drive token usage monitoring, cost optimisation, and model-tier selection strategies
Own post-deployment monitoring, prompt optimisation, and continuous improvement cycles

Essential

Required Skills & Experience

8+ years in software engineering with at least 3 years focused on AI/ML solutions
2+ years of hands-on experience with Large Language Models (GPT-4 class or equivalent) in production environments
Proven experience designing and delivering agentic AI systems (multi-agent orchestration, tool-calling, state management)
Strong proficiency in Python and modern AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent)
Deep understanding of prompt engineering: system prompts, context assembly, retrieval strategies, and evaluation methods
Experience with RAG architectures: vector databases, embedding models, chunking strategies, retrieval quality metrics
Hands-on experience with cloud AI platforms (Azure AI, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, or equivalent)
Experience leading engineering teams (2–6 direct reports) with a track record of delivering production AI systems
Strong understanding of CI/CD for AI workloads including eval-suite integration and automated testing
Knowledge of identity and security patterns: managed identities, RBAC, content safety, zero-trust principles

Desirable

Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Service Bus, or equivalent messaging systems)
Familiarity with ML model serving and MLOps (MLflow, model registries, drift detection)
Experience with OCR / Document Intelligence solutions
Knowledge of FinOps practices for AI workloads (token cost tracking, model-tier optimisation, budget governance)
Experience with rules engines (Drools, or equivalent)
Insurance, financial services, or other regulated-industry experience
Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Bicep, or equivalent)

Key Competencies

Technical Depth

Can go deep on LLM internals, agent orchestration, and system design while maintaining a broad architectural view

Delivery Focus

Drives outcomes through structured delivery with clear gates, quality bars, and accountability

Communication

Translates complex AI concepts for business audiences; writes clear design documents and architecture decision records

Pragmatism

Balances innovation with production readiness; knows when to PoC and when to ship

Security Mindset

Treats security as non-negotiable; designs with defence in depth from day one

People Leadership

Grows engineers through mentoring, code review, and creating space for experimentation

Collaboration

Works effectively across business, data, platform, and operations teams with a joint-accountability mindset

What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months)

Delivered 2–3 AI/agentic solutions to production with measurable business impact
Established engineering standards, templates, and accelerators adopted by the wider team
Built and maintained an evaluation framework with CI-integrated golden-set testing
Achieved stable production operations with defined SLAs, observability, and incident response
Grown the AI engineering team's capability through mentoring, knowledge sharing, and structured onboarding
Contributed to cross-cutting frameworks (security, observability, governance) used across the organisation

Allianz Group is one of the most trusted insurance and asset management companies in the world. Caring for our employees, their ambitions, dreams and challenges, is what makes us a unique employer. Together we can build an environment where everyone feels empowered and has the confidence to explore, to grow and to shape a better future for our customers and the world around us.

At Allianz, we stand for unity: we believe that a united world is a more prosperous world, and we are dedicated to consistently advocating for equal opportunities for all. And the foundation for this is our inclusive workplace, where people and performance both matter, and nurtures a culture grounded in integrity, fairness, inclusion and trust.

We therefore welcome applications regardless of ethnicity or cultural background, age, gender, nationality, religion, social class, disability or sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected under applicable local laws and regulations.

Great to have you on board.Let's care for tomorrow.

AI Tech Lead (Data Engineering)_D3006