AI Team Lead at McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. – St. Louis, Missouri

• Lead the day-to-day delivery of AI initiatives, coordinating engineering work across multiple projects and use cases
• Translate architectural direction from the AI Architect into actionable technical designs and implementation plans
• Guide the development of scalable AI solutions including data pipelines, model pipelines, and generative AI systems
• Mentor and support AI engineers through technical coaching, code reviews, and problem solving
• Provide clear direction, coaching, and ongoing feedback to AI team members, fostering a culture of learning, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
• Develop team members through structured goal setting, regular 1-on-1s, and tailored development plans, ensuring they grow in both technical depth and leadership capability.
• Establish and reinforce engineering best practices for AI development, including testing, version control, monitoring, and reproducibility
• Ensure MLOps and PromptOps processes are implemented consistently across the team
• Oversee the lifecycle of AI systems including model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Coordinate with data engineering, platform, and application teams to ensure reliable data access and system integration
• Support responsible AI governance by embedding transparency, auditability, and human oversight into deployed solutions
• Partner with business stakeholders to translate operational needs into technical AI solutions
• Identify opportunities to scale successful AI solutions across teams and projects

• 58 years of experience in AI/ML engineering, data science, or data engineering
• 13 years of technical leadership or project leadership experience guiding engineering teams or complex AI initiatives, with a focus on day-to-day coaching, removing obstacles, and helping team members progress in their roles while partnering closely with the manager on priorities.

• Strong people-leadership skills suited to a team led role, including giving candid, constructive feedback, mentoring emerging talent and reinforcing a high-performance team culture aligned with the organizations strategy and vision.

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

• Strong data engineering experience (ETL pipelines, Spark, cloud data platforms, SQL/NoSQL, APIs)
• Experience developing and deploying machine learning models and generative AI systems
• Proficiency in Python (pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, NLP frameworks)
• Experience working with LLM ecosystems and generative AI tooling (OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.)
• Experience building AI applications that integrate structured and unstructured data sources
• Familiarity with MLOps practices including model versioning, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability
• Experience managing prompt engineering workflows and prompt lifecycle management
• Understanding of agentic AI systems and the governance considerations associated with autonomous or semi-autonomous systems
• Experience deploying solutions in cloud environments and AI/ML platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, serverless architectures)

• Strong technical leadership with the ability to guide engineers while remaining hands-on
• Ability to translate complex architectural concepts into clear engineering tasks
• Excellent collaboration skills across engineering, platform, and business teams
• Comfortable operating in rapidly evolving AI environments and emerging technology landscapes
• Strategic mindset paired with strong execution discipline
• High levels of ownership, accountability, and engineering rigor
• Strong mentoring mindset with a commitment to growing the teams technical capabilities
• Commitment to responsible AI practices including transparency, explainability, and human oversight

McCarthy is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, including disability and protected veteran status.

NOTICE TO EXTERNAL SEARCH FIRMS: McCarthys Talent Acquisition Team is the only authorized representative permitted to engage with external search firms, staffing agencies, or other third-party recruiting partners. McCarthy maintains an Approved Agency List for recruiting partners, which is reviewed and updated annually.

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