Principal AI App Engineer

About This Role

Please submit your application in English

Application Deadline May 17

WHAT MAKES US A GREAT PLACE TO WORK

We are proud to be consistently recognized as one of the world’s best places to work. We are currently the top ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work

list and have earned the #1 overall spot a record seven times. Extraordinary teams are at the heart of our business strategy, but these don’t happen by chance. They require intentional focus on bringing together a broad set of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and skills in a supportive and inclusive work environment. We hire people with exceptional talent and create an environment in which every individual can thrive professionally and personally.

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

You’ll join our Engineering experts within the AI, Insights & Solutions team . This team is part of Bain’s digital capabilities practice, which includes experts in analytics, engineering, product management, and design. In this multidisciplinary environment, you'll leverage deep technical expertise with business acumen to help clients tackle their most transformative challenges. You’ll work on integrated teams alongside our general consultants and clients to develop data-driven strategies and innovative solutions. Together, we create human-centric solutions that harness the power of data and artificial intelligence to drive competitive advantage for our clients. Our collaborative and supportive work environment fosters creativity and continuous learning, enabling us to consistently deliver exceptional results.

WHAT YOU’LL DO  As an Expert Manager, Software Engineering, you will lead the development and building of software applications that address complex business and technology problems in various industries. You will guide a diverse engineering team through the entire engineering life cycle. Your responsibilities will include designing, developing, optimizing, and deploying cutting-edge software engineering solutions and infrastructure at the production scale required by the world’s largest companies, with a strong focus on ensuring technical delivery supports business strategy, operating model evolution, and sustainable value creation.

• Shape & scope client solutions. Work with Bain consulting teams and product owners to translate business problems into prioritized backlogs and technical roadmaps for cross-functional engineering squads
• Translate technical capabilities into client-ready product and transformation outcomes by shaping product direction, operating model implications, and change management approaches that support adoption and measurable business impact
• Own full-stack design & build. Lead the architecture, development and documentation of AI applications, including coding and integrating third-party services or frameworks that accelerate delivery and long-term maintainability
• Establish AI-native software engineering best practices. Define and enforce standards around component libraries/design systems, automated testing, linting, CI/CD, accessibility and performance optimization
• Develop reusable libraries & accelerators. Create and curate shared code assets that reduce time-to-value across multiple client projects and internal initiatives.
• Lead the full delivery lifecycle. Set quality gates, supervise code reviews, ensure robust unit/integration test coverage, manage release planning, and oversee post-deployment monitoring and incident resolution
• Partner on UI/UX excellence. Collaborate with designers to ship inclusive, responsive interfaces
• Mentor & grow engineers. Provide day-to-day technical coaching for senior and mid-level engineers through pair programming, architecture sessions and constructive feedback
• Upskill client engineering teams. Coach client developers on modern tooling and DevOps/cloud-native practices, ensuring sustainable ownership after Bain’s engagement
• Advance AI-native technology adoption. Champion containerization, infrastructure-as-code, automated observability and secure-by-design principles to improve scalability, reliability and security
• Contribute to communities of practice. Share lessons learned and emerging technology trends through internal forums, brown-bag sessions and knowledge assets
• Support talent acquisition & onboarding. Participate in interviewing, technical assessments and mentoring of new hires to build a high-caliber engineering cohort
• Travel is required. This position requires regional travel away from your home office/primary working location. Travel frequency and destinations will vary based on project needs

ABOUT YOU

Technical Skills & Knowledge

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

• 6+ years of end-to-end experience designing, building and maintaining production-grade full-stack applications

• Experience working directly with business stakeholders to translate strategic objectives into solution, platform products or roadmaps

• 4+ years building server-side services using FastAPI, Node.js/Express, Flask, Django, .NET Core or Java Spring Boot or similar technologies, including the design of APIs

• 3+ years of architecting and operating micro-service ecosystems, emphasizing service discovery, observability, CI/CD automation and blue-/green or canary deployments

• Expert knowledge of Python, JavaScript and/or other programming languages

• Experience with cloud-native delivery on AWS, Azure or GCP, knowledge of managed services, serverless patterns and infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform, CloudFormation or Bicep

• Proficient with containerization and orchestration, Docker, Kubernetes and related tooling (Helm, Argo CD)

• Experience with database architecture across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server) and NoSQL/document stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), with solid SQL skills

• Solid computer science fundamentals, data structures, algorithms, object-oriented and functional paradigms, automated testing, performance profiling

• Excellence in software architecture design, including modular, distributed, and cloud-native systems, scalability, resiliency, maintainability, and observability

• Experience with data security, OAuth 2.0/OIDC, JWT, SSO/cloud IAM, encryption in transit, at rest, and awareness of data protection regulations.

• Ideally, experience with modern AI/ML development, working with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, agentic SDKs and AI safety

• Ideally, hands-on experience with modern web technologies such as React, Angular, Vue.js, TypeScript, HTML5 and CSS3

• Proven leader and mentor with ability to lead engineering squads, set coding standards, perform rigorous code reviews and up skill junior engineers.

• Agile delivery mindset, practical experience with Scrum or Kanban, story-point estimation, backlog grooming and the use of Git-based workflows, Jira and automated CI/CD pipelines.

• Professional fluency in English

Interpersonal Skills

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to explain and discuss technicalities of solutions, algorithms and techniques with colleagues and clients from other disciplines
• Curiosity, proactivity and critical thinking
• Ability to collaborate with people at all levels and with multi-office/region teams
• Ability to work independently and juggle priorities to thrive in a fast paced and ambiguous environment, while also collaborating as part of a team in complex situations