Lead AI Engineer, Agentic AI Systems Compensation: Up to ~$220K base + 30% bonus + equity Location: Pittsburgh, PA — onsite Must be a US Citizen 🇺🇸 Company Summary: A fast-growing, venture-backed defense software company building AI-enabled platforms for mission-critical government and national security workflows. About the Company We’re partnering with a high-growth software company applying modern AI to some of the most complex and consequential workflows in the public sector. Their platform helps national security and defense teams move faster, make better decisions, and replace slow manual processes with data-driven, AI-enabled systems. This is not generic AI SaaS. The team is building production-grade agentic AI for real-world acquisition, readiness, supply chain, logistics, sustainment, and modernization use cases. The Role We’re looking for a Lead AI Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for a small, high-performing AI engineering team building a next-generation agent layer into a core enterprise platform. This is a technical leadership role, not a people-management role. You’ll still be writing production code, shaping architecture, mentoring engineers, and helping the team move quickly from ambiguous AI ideas to deployed product capabilities. What You’ll Do • Lead technical execution across applied AI and agentic workflow initiatives • Guide architecture and implementation for tool-using AI agents and workflow orchestration • Help evolve an AI assistant from retrieval/chat into a production-grade agentic system • Stay close to emerging agent frameworks, LLM tooling, and coding-agent workflows • Write production-quality code across backend, AI, and product systems • Mentor, unblock, and provide practical technical direction to engineers • Help the team make fast, thoughtful decisions in a highly ambiguous product space • Collaborate closely with onsite teams through whiteboarding, planning, and technical reviews What You’ll Bring • Strong software engineering fundamentals • Hands-on experience building AI/LLM products in production • Recent experience with agents, agentic frameworks, tool use, or LLM workflow systems • Experience taking ambiguous AI concepts from zero to one • Technical leadership experience, ideally 2+ years • Ability to lead through influence rather than formal people management • Strong ownership mentality and a bias toward shipping • Comfort using AI coding tools and code generation workflows heavily • US citizenship • Existing security clearance or willingness and eligibility to obtain one • Willingness to work onsite in Pittsburgh and travel occasionally, especially to DC Tech Stack • LLMs and applied AI systems • Agentic workflows and tool orchestration • Retrieval-augmented generation • Claude / Anthropic tooling • OpenAI Agents SDK or equivalent frameworks • LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom agent frameworks • Backend or full-stack product engineering • Coding agents such as Claude Code or similar tools • Production AI infrastructure and application systems Why Join? This is a rare opportunity to work at the frontier of applied agentic AI in a real production environment with meaningful national security impact. You’ll join a small, hands-on AI team with strong company momentum, modern engineering practices, and executive-level commitment to scaling AI across a mission-critical platform. If you want to build serious AI systems rather than demos, this is a role with real scope, ownership, and visibility. About People In AI People In AI is a specialist talent partner for high-growth AI, machine learning, and data companies. We work closely with exceptional technical teams to connect them with engineers, researchers, and product builders shaping the future of AI.