AI Lead

Primary DetailsTime Type: Full timeWorker Type: Employee

The Opportunity:The purpose of this role is to lead the design, delivery, and enhancement of technical solutions for complex business requirements, ensuring high-quality application support and reporting that meets user specifications. The role involves managing application strategies, roadmaps, and delivery capabilities, as well as providing subject matter expertise and leadership in technical design and issues related to existing applications. Additionally, the role includes mentoring junior developers, driving user acceptance testing, and actively engaging with business stakeholders to influence the adoption of solutions.
Location: Chicago·
Work Arrangement: Hybrid·
The salary range for this role is: $116,000 - $191,500
Your New Role:
AI Strategy & Leadership
Lead the design, architecture, and deployment of enterprise AI and Generative AI solutions aligned with business and technology priorities.
Partner with Product, Technology, Data, Security, Architecture, and Business leaders to identify and deliver high-value AI opportunities.
Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship across AI delivery teams.
Establish scalable AI patterns, standards, and best practices across the organization.
Drive AI innovation while balancing business value, risk, security, and operational considerations.
AI Solution Design & Delivery
Architect and deliver AI solutions built on the Microsoft Azure AI platform, including:
Azure AI Foundry
Azure OpenAI Service
Azure AI Search
AI Agents and Agentic Workflows
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
Prompt Engineering
Model Evaluation & Observability
Build scalable solutions that integrate enterprise data sources, APIs, and business systems.
Lead solution design reviews and transform architectural feedback into pragmatic, production-ready designs.
Establish reusable AI frameworks and accelerators that can be leveraged across multiple business domains.
LLM & AI Platform Expertise
Evaluate, select, and operationalize leading foundation models based on business use cases.
Implement solutions using models hosted within Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI services.
Work with multiple LLM providers including:
OpenAI GPT
Anthropic Claude
Google Gemini
Microsoft Copilot ecosystem
Emerging enterprise AI platforms
Understand trade-offs between performance, cost, latency, governance, and business outcomes.
Governance, Security & Architecture
Partner closely with Cyber Security, Enterprise Architecture, Infrastructure, Networking, and Risk teams.
Design AI solutions that meet enterprise security, privacy, compliance, and governance standards.
Navigate architecture review boards and security approval processes.
Develop and advocate for approved AI patterns, reference architectures, and governance frameworks.
Ensure Responsible AI principles are embedded across solution design and delivery.
Innovation & Delivery
Rapidly prototype new concepts and proof-of-concepts to validate emerging opportunities.
Drive successful transition from experimentation to enterprise-scale implementation.
Act as a change agent, helping teams adopt modern AI capabilities and ways of working.
Influence and align stakeholders across multiple teams, business units, and technology functions.
Work Experience:

Technical Expertise

Deep experience designing and deploying enterprise AI and Generative AI solutions.
Strong hands-on experience with:
Azure AI Foundry
Azure OpenAI Services
RAG architectures, Agentic AI solutions
Prompt Engineering techniques
LLM evaluation frameworks
API integrations and cloud-native architectures
Experience with multiple LLM providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and Google Gemini.
Strong software engineering background with proficiency in Python.
Familiarity with data science methodologies and machine learning fundamentals.
Understanding of vector databases, embeddings, semantic search, and knowledge retrieval architectures.
Enterprise Delivery & Platforms

Experience working with modern enterprise delivery toolsets, including:

Azure DevOps
GitHub, GitHub Copilot
Jira, ServiceNow, CI/CD and DevOps practices

Architecture & Infrastructure

Strong understanding of enterprise application architecture.
Working knowledge of networking concepts, cloud connectivity patterns, APIs, authentication, and security controls.
Experience collaborating with infrastructure, networking, cybersecurity, and enterprise architecture teams.
Ability to evolve solution designs based on architecture and security review feedback.

Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications include

Relevant industry qualifications.
Tertiary Degree or equivalent combination of education and work experience.

Compensation Package

The salary range for this role is provided above. This is the national range for location(s) listed. The salary offer will be decided based on the role's complexity, its location, and the candidate’s professional background, including their education and experience. Beyond the base salary, regular full-time and part-time employees will also be eligible for QBE’s annual discretionary bonus plan based on business and individual performance. We encourage all candidates to apply, even if their salary expectations fall outside of this range, as we are committed to finding the right fit for our team.

QBE Benefits: We offer a range of benefits to help provide holistic support for your work life, whatever your circumstances. As a QBE employee you will have access to:

Hybrid Working – a mix of working from home and in the office
22 weeks of paid leave for family growth, with 12 weeks available to all parents on a gender-equal basis
Competitive 401(k) program with company match up to 8%
Well-being program including holistic wellbeing coaching, gym membership, confidential counselling, financial and legal advice
Tuition Reimbursement for professional certifications, and continuing education
Employee Network and Community – QBE active