Senior AI Engineer
Cushman & Wakefield•Costa Mesa, CA
•$124,780 - $146,800
About The Position
Build the next generation of scalable, AI-powered software with modern tools, cloud-native systems, and world-class engineering practices. Cushman & Wakefield is investing heavily in modernizing and transforming its global technology platforms — and we are looking for a Sr AI Engineering Lead who wants to own technical direction end to end. AI is the primary differentiator here, not a side feature: you will define how intelligence is embedded across products built on top of a complex, multi-source enterprise data estate spanning a global commercial real estate firm (properties, leases, work orders, capital projects, and occupier analytics). If you're motivated by technical breadth, architectural influence, and building elite engineering teams — you'll thrive here.
Requirements
- Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience and 3+ years leading technical teams or engineering managers.
- Deep experience with modern full-stack development, cloud-native systems, distributed architectures, and high-scale platforms.
- Demonstrated experience designing and shipping production LLM/AI systems: agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, text-to-SQL grounding, and AI evaluation harnesses.
- Hands-on expertise with Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, Java, SQL/NoSQL; React, Next.js, Node.js, FastAPI, .NET, Angular Core, microservices, Kubernetes.
- Strong command of DevOps, CI/CD automation, infrastructure-as-code, and observability.
- Strategic engineering thinker who balances innovation with disciplined execution.
- Proven ability to mentor engineers, grow high-performing teams, and attract top talent.
- Ability to influence product, business, and technical leadership.
- Comfortable making architectural decisions that require both technical depth and business awareness.
Nice To Haves
- Distributed event streaming (Kafka, EventHub), CQRS/event-sourcing patterns.
- Experience building platforms used across global organizations.
- Experience technically overseeing external development vendors or contract engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Define multi-year architectural direction across full-stack systems, cloud platforms, and AI-driven products — focusing on scale, resilience, security, and global performance.
- Establish standards for agentic workflows, intelligent search, conversational interfaces, and data-grounded reasoning across CW's enterprise platforms.
- Shape engineering roadmaps using best-in-class development stacks (e.g., TypeScript/Node.js, Python, Go, C#, React, Next.js, microservices, event-driven architectures).
- Foster a modern engineering culture emphasizing automation, craftsmanship, clean architecture, and continuous improvement.
- Guide the design and development of solutions built with specified frontend, backend, cloud & infra, data & AI, and APIs technologies.
- Drive innovation by embedding AI/ML, automation, production prompt engineering (system prompt architecture, context injection, business-rule encoding, citation and grounding patterns), intelligent workflows, and data interoperability into core products.
- Champion excellence through best practices in enterprise-grade CI/CD, automated testing, contract testing, quality gates, observability platforms, secure-by-design principles, threat modeling, and zero trust patterns.
- Oversee engineering delivery across multiple squads — ensuring consistency, velocity, and reliability.
- Define and enforce AI engineering standards across products and external delivery teams, including AI evaluation framework design, pre-semantic data contracts, AI governance, and LLM system design standards.
- Lead architectural reviews and key design decisions across services, domains, and integrations.
- Establish patterns for scalability, fault tolerance, global data compliance, and cost optimization.
- Maintain high standards in coding, cloud security, API governance, and data interoperability.
- Partner with Product, Architecture, Operations, and Client Technology to prioritize work, unblock teams, and drive outcomes.
- Represent engineering in executive and governance forums with clarity around architectural options, tradeoffs, and investment needs.
- Translate complex engineering realities into clear business insights that support strategic decision-making.
Benefits
- health, vision, and dental insurance
- flexible spending accounts
- health savings accounts
- retirement savings plans
- life, and disability insurance programs
- paid and unpaid time away from work
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
