Principal, AI Engineering Lead
Ares Management Corporation12 days ago
Base Salary
$275k - $350k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and build the enterprise generative AI platform on Databricks and Azure, including model serving, retrieval infrastructure, agent orchestration, and deployment pipelines.
- Architect and operate a multi-LLM gateway with routing, cost tracking, rate limiting, and model failover across Azure OpenAI and other providers.
- Build hybrid RAG retrieval services using embedding models, Databricks Vector Search, Unity Catalog, structured extraction, and analytical, semantic, and hybrid query routing.
- Develop reusable agentic orchestration, model registry, prompt library, agent-to-agent workflows, and sandbox-to-production deployment capabilities.
- Implement MNPI controls, information barriers, audit logging, access controls, and retrieval permissioning aligned with governance requirements.
- Maintain LLM observability for latency, token spend, retrieval quality, hallucination flags, and per-use-case cost attribution.
- Define platform APIs, SDKs, engineering standards, evaluation criteria, and reusable patterns for vertical AI teams.
- Provide technical guidance and code review, collaborate with AI Product Management and business stakeholders, and mentor senior and mid-level AI engineers.
- Drive technical decisions, resolve cross-cutting platform issues, and produce architecture diagrams, decision records, and governance documentation.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software or data engineering and 4+ years focused on ML/AI platform engineering or LLM application development.
- Deep hands-on experience with Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Model Serving, and Vector Search on Azure or comparable platforms.
- Production experience building RAG pipelines with embedding models, vector databases, hybrid retrieval, and document chunking strategies.
- Strong Python engineering experience, including API services, asynchronous patterns, prompt templating, and LLM SDK integration.
- Experience with multi-LLM gateway and model-routing patterns such as LiteLLM, plus LLM providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure OpenAI.
- Familiarity with agentic frameworks and multi-agent orchestration patterns such as LangGraph, AutoGen, or custom implementations.
- Proficiency with Azure OpenAI, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Entra ID, Key Vault, and Azure Networking.
- Experience with MLflow or equivalent tools for experiment tracking, model versioning, and registry management.
- Strong DevOps fundamentals involving CI/CD for ML/AI, infrastructure-as-code, container deployment, and observability tooling.
- Experience in regulated industries with data governance, access controls, and audit requirements.
- Ability to translate complex business workflows into platform architecture, communicate with senior stakeholders, and produce executive-quality governance documentation.
- Track record of setting engineering standards across multiple teams and operating autonomously in a greenfield environment.
- Preferred: private equity, investment banking, asset management, or related financial-services experience and familiarity with deal, portfolio, investor-relations, fund-accounting, or compliance workflows.
- Preferred: MCP gateway design, agent tool-use frameworks, RAGAS, LLM-as-judge or custom evaluation harnesses, Langfuse, Weights & Biases, and AI governance processes.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical/Rx, dental, and vision plans.
- 401(k) program with company match, Flexible Savings Accounts, and Healthcare Savings Accounts with company contribution.
- Basic and voluntary life insurance, short-term and long-term disability insurance, Employee Assistance Program, and commuter benefits for parking and transit.
- Access to medical advisory, mental health, mindfulness and wellbeing, and financial wellness programs.
- New parent leave, reproductive and adoption assistance, emergency backup care, matching gift program, education sponsorship, and additional benefits.
- Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the search is no longer active.
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