Lead AI Engineer

It's fun to work in a company where people truly believe in what they're doing! We're committed to bringing passion and customer focus to the business. Trio WFS builds Digital Workers, autonomous AI systems that execute real operational workflows in healthcare workforce management, already running in production and delivering measurable results for our clients. The Lead AI Engineer is the senior technical authority for this work, responsible for driving the architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards that support Trio's AI-powered products, Digital Workers, and intelligent automation capabilities. This role leads the design and evolution of complex AI systems spanning agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures, orchestration frameworks, evaluation platforms, observability capabilities, and product AI infrastructure. The Lead AI Engineer operates as the technical leader for the AI Engineering team, influencing architecture decisions across Trio's products while partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Platform, and executive stakeholders. This role is being developed with a clear path toward team leadership. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with a genuine desire to grow into people management, and will be coached and mentored to eventually lead the AI Engineering team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role on a small, high-leverage team of one Senior AI Engineer and one AI Engineer, with direct exposure to Engineering, Product, and executive leadership. What You'll Work On The Digital Worker framework, a pattern where policies (the questions a client needs answered) combine with features (the data available to answer them) to produce grounded, auditable decisions. Extending this framework to new workflows is the core of the job. Evaluation infrastructure, the harness that lets us quantitatively measure whether a change to a prompt, retrieval strategy, or model actually improved anything. This gates what ships. Platform orchestration, an event-driven orchestrator with autoscaling, input-level quarantine, and per-worker circuit breaking. Centralized inference, an LLM gateway that routes, logs, and controls cost and latency across every AI-powered capability in the product. Retrieval and knowledge systems, ingestion, embedding, indexing, and grounding strategies that keep answers accurate and traceable. Principal Responsibilities Architecture & Technical Direction Own the architecture of the Digital Worker platform and the AI capabilities embedded in Trio's products Establish design principles, engineering patterns, and architectural standards for AI systems Lead technical design reviews and make the tradeoff calls on quality, latency, cost, and operational complexity Evaluate emerging AI technologies and determine what is worth adopting AI Systems Engineering Design and build production systems using LLMs, retrieval architectures, agentic workflows, and tool use Build reusable frameworks for agent orchestration, tool integration, workflow execution, and memory Solve the hardest technical problems on the team, hands-on Evaluation & Quality Own the standards for how we measure AI quality: accuracy, groundedness, safety, latency, and business impact Build and extend evaluation frameworks that catch regressions and hallucinations before clients do Drive measurable improvement in system quality through experimentation and production learning Observability & Operational Excellence Define monitoring, tracing, and logging standards for AI systems in production Establish reliability and performance objectives; serve as senior escalation for critical AI production issues Improve production readiness and AI lifecycle management as the platform scales Technical Leadership & Partnership Mentor the AI Engineering team and grow their architectural judgment and engineering depth Lead code and design reviews; set and enforce engineering standards Partner with Product, Platform, Data, Security, and executive stakeholders Translate business objectives into technical strategy, and technical tradeoffs into business terms Growth Path We are hiring a technical leader first. As the AI Engineering team grows, this role is expected to take on formal leadership of it. We will discuss what that path looks like openly during the interview process, including timeline expectations and what the transition into people management actually involves. Education Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred: Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline. Required Experience 7+ years in software engineering, data engineering, or a closely related technical field 2+ years building and operating production LLM-powered systems, not prototypes or demos Demonstrated depth in agentic systems, RAG architectures, or AI orchestration frameworks Solid understanding of machine learning fundamentals Strong distributed systems and software architecture fundamentals Professional proficiency in Python; comfort in a polyglot environment Track record of evaluating AI system quality quantitatively and acting on the results Experience mentoring engineers on technical and architectural decisions Excellent written and verbal communication with both technical and executive audiences Preferred Experience Prior experience leading or managing a team Azure cloud, Azure OpenAI, and event-driven infrastructure Vector databases, semantic search, embeddings, and enterprise knowledge systems Building agent orchestration platforms or autonomous workflow systems at scale AI governance, security, compliance, or responsible AI practices .NET/C#, React/TypeScript, SQL Server, CosmosDB, Auth0, Azure DevOps, Datadog SaaS, workforce technology, healthcare, or high-growth technology organizations Success Metrics First 90 days: fluent in the Digital Worker platform and evaluation harness, owning at least one significant architectural decision, established as a technical resource for the team. First 12 months: Measurable improvement in AI quality, groundedness, latency, and cost efficiency across production Digital Workers Evaluation and observability coverage extended to every production AI capability Reduction in AI-related production incidents and regressions Reusable frameworks and standards adopted across AI engineering work Demonstrable technical growth in AI Engineering team members New Digital Worker capabilities delivered faster, with less bespoke engineering per workflow Location This role is fully remote. Candidates within a reasonable commuting distance of our Frisco, TX or Edmond, OK offices are welcome to work from either location, and we'd love to build out our presence in both over time, but it is not a requirement. Compensation The expected base salary range for this position is $150,000 to $180,000 annually. The final compensation offered will be determined based on a number of factors, including but not limited to skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Equal Employment Opportunity Statement All AHSG companies, including AHS Staffing and Trio Workforce Solutions, are Equal Employment Opportunity employers. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. Reasonable Accommodation Statement (ADA) AHSG will not refuse to hire or otherwise discriminate against a job applicant with a disability who is capable of performing the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation.  If you need an accommodation to apply for a position or to perform the essential functions of the role, please let us know. Essential Functions / Job Requirements Qualified candidates must be able to perform the essential functions of the position, with or without reasonable accommodation. Requirements may vary depending on the role. A detailed job description, including the essential functions and any physical requirements, will be provided upon request. Example of Role-Specific Requirements (when applicable) For this position, the essential functions may include: Remaining in a stationary position for approximately 50% of the workday Learning and applying new tasks and procedures Maintaining attention and completing work independently Making timely workflow-related decisions Meeting productivity and/or time-based performance expectations Qualified candidates must possess the physical and mental abilities necessary to perform the job's essential functions, with or without reasonable accommodation. Specific requirements may vary depending on the nature of the position. Applicants should be prepared to discuss their ability to meet these requirements during the interview process. A detailed job description outlining the physical and mental demands of the role will be provided upon request. All AHSG companies, AHS Staffing, AHSA, and Trio Workforce Solutions are equal employment opportunity employers .