About the Role

IDC is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to lead the Memory/Living Intel Pod, building AI-powered intelligence platforms. The role involves leading a cross-functional team, designing memory and proactive intelligence systems, and writing production code. The ideal candidate has 7+ years Python experience and proven LLM production experience.

Responsibilities

Lead a cross-functional pod of 4-8 engineers spanning AI/LLM and backend infrastructure disciplines
Set the technical direction for the pod's memory and proactive intelligence systems
Build memory capabilities that give the platform persistent, cross-session understanding of each user
Design proactive intelligence systems that monitor artifacts for changes, summarize what matters, and route alerts to the right channel
Integrate with the AI agent pipeline and channel adapters built by adjacent teams
Define interfaces and contracts with adjacent teams
Write production code (more than 50% of the time)

Requirements

7+ years of professional Python development experience
Proven experience building LLM-powered systems in production environments
Player-coach track record leading teams of 4-8 engineers while remaining a significant code contributor
Experience leading across disciplines, bridging AI/LLM engineering and infrastructure engineering
Strong background in asynchronous system design: background jobs, event-driven patterns, scheduled processing
Quality-minded approach to system design and code
Comfort with ambiguity and building from scratch

Nice to Have

Experience building systems that maintain or evolve user context and state over time
Familiarity with semantic search, embeddings, and vector databases (e.g., Snowflake Cortex, Pinecone, Weaviate)
Background in event-driven architectures, job scheduling, and change detection patterns
Experience with LLM observability tools (e.g., Langfuse, LangSmith, Weights & Biases)
Track record of standing up new teams from zero