Technical Lead (Applied AI)

Job description

X by 2 is a technology consulting firm specializing in healthcare and insurance transformation. For over 25 years, we have partnered with leading organizations across North America — from strategy and architecture to system modernization, data analytics, and AI — delivering high-impact solutions from start to finish. We're agile, collaborative, and deeply committed to doing consulting the way it was meant to be done. We are looking for a **Technical Lead** who will lead the design and development of AI solutions within enterprise environments for our clients. You'll combine hands-on engineering with leadership, guiding architecture decisions, mentoring teams, and building solutions. ### Responsibilities - **Technical Leadership & Architecture** - Lead architecture, design, development, testing, and deployment of enterprise software solutions (applications, data, integration, AI agents, AI models) - Participate in strategy and roadmap discussions, architecture definition, and technology evaluations - Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance - Quickly evaluate and adopt new tools, technologies, and platforms to build prototypes and proofs-of-concept - Drive adoption of AI solutions and collaborate with engineering teams, product leaders, and domain experts to deliver results - **Software Engineering** - Design, develop, and maintain scalable, production-grade enterprise applications using modern languages and frameworks (Python, Java, C#, JavaScript) - Define and enforce coding standards, best practices, and design patterns across the team - Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud-deployed services (AWS, Azure) - Integrate enterprise systems via APIs, event-driven architectures, and messaging platforms - Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, technical debt, and system reliability issues - **Data & Analytics** - Work with large, complex datasets and ensure data quality and integrity - Analyze data to generate insights that inform both model development and broader solution strategy - Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business problems into data-driven solutions - **AI / Machine Learning Development** - Design, develop, and train machine learning and deep learning models for healthcare and insurance use cases - Perform data modeling and feature engineering to support model development - Develop custom model metrics and approaches tailored to specific business problems - Ensure models are scalable, reliable, and integrated into production systems - **Agentic AI Development** - Design and develop LLM-powered workflows and agentic systems that help users complete complex tasks, retrieve information, reason over enterprise data, or interact with internal systems. - Integrate LLMs with tools, APIs, databases, documents, and enterprise platforms using patterns such as function calling, MCP, RAG, and structured tool use. - Architect orchestration patterns for planning, task decomposition, memory, context management, and human-in-the-loop review where appropriate. - Develop orchestration layers to manage agent planning, memory, task decomposition, and execution loops - Evaluate agentic systems for correctness, reliability, safety, observability, auditability, and harden them for production readiness. - Stay current with emerging AI frameworks and platforms, selecting tools pragmatically based on client needs. ### Qualifications - **Experience** - 6+ years of experience in software engineering designing and developing enterprise applications, data/analytics solutions, and/or integration solutions - 1+ years of providing technical leadership as Tech Lead, Lead Engineer, or Architect - 1+ years in developing AI agents and/or AI model development and training - **Education** - Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Development, Software Engineering, or Computer Engineering - (Optional) Master's Degree or Minor in AI/Machine Learning or Statistics - **AI Engineering Skills** *(Two or More)* - Agentic AI: building and integrating autonomous AI agents using LLM APIs and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, MCP) - Machine Learning & Deep Learning: developing and training models using standard ML/DL frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn) - Data Engineering & Feature Engineering: building data pipelines, performing feature engineering, and ensuring data quality across large, complex datasets - Context Engineering: Agentic SQL retrieval, MCP integration, agentic tool use, as well as vector databases & RAG techniques implementing retrieval-augmented generation patterns using vector stores (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, ChromaDB), . - LLM Prompt Engineering & Fine-Tuning: designing and evaluating effective prompts, system instructions, and fine-tuning strategies for production LLM applications - AI Evaluation & Production Readiness**:** defining evaluation methods, testing model behavior, monitoring performance, and addressing reliability, safety, explainability, and auditability concerns - **What We're Looking For** - You move fluidly between writing code and leading a room — equally comfortable in a design review as you are in a pull request - You have strong opinions about architecture and aren't afraid to share them, but you know when to listen and adapt - You take ownership seriously — on small teams, your decisions have real impact and you're energized by that, not intimidated - You're genuinely curious about AI, not just checking a box — you've experimented with agentic systems, LLMs, or ML tools on your own terms - You communicate clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and can translate complexity without dumbing it down ### Location - Metro Detroit or North Carolina Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) - Hybrid: flexibility to work remotely, but not fully remote - Travel to X by 2 offices (Farmington Hills, MI) and client sites (within US) is required when requested ### Work Environment and Culture - Work alongside smart, collaborative people who continually challenge and invest in each other - Partner with seasoned architects to solve hard problems and challenge assumptions - Small teams mean real ownership, with growth and responsibilities driven purely by individual performance - Everyone has a voice and is encouraged to shape the company by sharing their interests, ideas, and feedback ### Compensation & Benefits - Base salary $143K–$185K, depending on experience, plus profit sharing - Annual raises and promotions based on performance - 401(k) with employer match - Comprehensive health, vision, dental, life, and disability insurance coverage, plus voluntary benefits and HSA with employer contribution - Home Office Reimbursement, Health and Wellness Reimbursement, and Professional Dress Allowance - Professional Self-Development Program - Paid vacation, unlimited sick days (as needed), and holidays - Company-sponsored social events and an employee recognition rewards program ### Sound Like You? We're not looking for someone who has done everything — we're looking for someone who is driven to. If you thrive in environments where you can move fast, go deep, and make a real difference for clients solving complex problems in healthcare and insurance, we'd love to hear from you.