Lead Engineer — AI Developer Platform

Job Description Summary

Note: This position follows our hybrid-friendly schedule, so you get the best of both worlds – flexibility and collaboration. In office days are 3 days per week (including a Monday or Friday), in our St Petersburg, FL Corporate Office.

This role is not eligible for Work Visa sponsorship, either currently or in the future.

Job Description

About the Role:

We are seeking a hands-on Lead Engineer to drive the technical vision and function as a process engineer utilizing our internal AI systems, platforms, and frameworks.

Already adopted by multiple engineering teams, our internal platform is expanding across the firm. We are focused on improving scalability, reliability, ease of adoption, and flexibility as AI technologies rapidly evolve. This role will lead the platform architecture, establish engineering standards, and deliver high-impact technical solutions.

You will spend your time coding, reviewing designs and pull requests, solving complex technical challenges, supporting production environments, and shaping long-term platform strategy. This is an ideal opportunity for a technical leader passionate about building tools that enable engineers to work smarter and faster.

What You'll Do:

Set the Technical Direction

• Define and evolve the platform architecture, ensuring scalability, extensibility, and maintainability.
• Design solutions that remain compatible across multiple AI providers, coding tools, and operating systems.
• Establish engineering patterns and best practices for the broader team.

Deliver High-Impact Solutions

Lead and contribute directly to key platform initiatives, including:

• Streamlining platform installation and onboarding across Windows and macOS.
• Building telemetry and reporting capabilities to provide visibility into AI usage, costs, and adoption.
• Developing secure, sandboxed environments for AI-assisted development and testing.
• Expanding AI agent capabilities, enterprise integrations, and business-domain knowledge resources.

Maintain AI Platform Agility

• Continuously assess emerging AI models, developer tools, and orchestration technologies.
• Recommend and implement new capabilities while avoiding unnecessary vendor dependency.
• Partner with product leadership to evaluate capabilities and define future roadmap priorities.
  

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Ensure high standards for code quality, testing, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Lead code reviews and architectural reviews for core platform components.
• Support incident response and continuous platform improvements.

Lead Through Influence

• Provide technical leadership across a distributed contributor model.
• Facilitate design reviews, solve complex technical challenges, and mentor engineers.
• Foster collaboration across engineering teams contributing to the platform.

Partner with Platform Users

• Engage regularly with engineering teams using the platform.
• Gather feedback, identify pain points, and translate insights into platform enhancements.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to prioritize investments and improve developer experience.

What You Bring:

• 8+ years of senior engineering experience building enterprise-grade software that other engineers or business teams depend on — internal platforms, large-scale services, developer tooling, SDKs, or similar systems.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience building solutions powered by large language models (LLMs) or AI agent frameworks.
• Prior experience building or extending agentic coding tools like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex, and IDEs like VS Code — or comparable tools.
• Strong proficiency in Python and working knowledge of Node.js and TypeScript.
• Direct experience designing or substantially extending integrations between AI coding tools and external systems (any of: Model Context Protocol servers, custom LangChain/LangGraph tools, Copilot extensions, JetBrains AI plugins, Cursor / Continue / Aider integrations).
• A working point of view on at least one production AI coding tool — enough to reason intelligently about prompt design, tool-use loops, context window economics, and where these systems tend to fail.
• Experience with more than one LLM provider and a clear position on building provider-agnostic abstractions so the platform isn't trapped on a single vendor's roadmap.
• Cross-platform engineering experience across Windows, macOS, and Linux, including the realities of installers, path handling, shells, and credential storage on each.
• Background in one or more of the technology stacks our application teams use (Python, Java/Spring, Angular, React, .NET, Oracle, Redshift, SQL Server) — enough to be credible reviewing stack-specific contributions.
• A track record of shipping infrastructure that other engineers depend on every day, and being accountable when it breaks.
• Comfort working in a regulated environment — financial services — with the discipline that implies around secrets, data classification, change management, and auditability, and practical experience with the security and data-protection concerns specific to LLM systems: prompt-injection mitigation, secret-leak prevention through prompts and tool outputs, PII redaction, and trust boundaries around model output.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of the software development lifecycle and modern engineering methodologies — agile, trunk-based development, code review, CI/CD, and observability-driven operations — and experience operating in a mature CI/CD and observability environment (e.g., Azure DevOps, Jenkins, SonarQube, and a log or APM platform such as Splunk, Datadog, or Dynatrace).
• Demonstrated technical leadership without direct authority — you have written architecture decision records that drove real consensus, presented technical direction to senior engineering and business leadership, and mentored other senior engineers (not just juniors) into stronger work.
• Prior work on agent evaluation — golden task sets, regression suites, judge models, or other ways of measuring whether an AI workflow is actually getting better over time.
• Active engagement with the developer-tools, AI agents, or AI/ML open-source community — substantive contributions, conference talks, or published writing that demonstrates depth and a public point of view.

Licenses/Certifications:

• None required.

Education

Bachelor’s - Completed: Computer and Information Science, High School (HS) - Completed (Required)

Work Experience

General Experience - 3 to 6 years

Certifications

Travel

Less than 25%

Workstyle

Hybrid

The total compensation for this position includes base salary or wages, and may include components such as additional compensation (cash or equity), discretionary bonuses, or commissions. This position is eligible for a benefits package that may include medical, dental, and vision; life insurance; critical illness insurance and accident insurance; disability benefits; retirement savings; paid time off (including vacation, holidays, and sick leave); and parental leave.  Eligibility for benefits and specific offerings may vary based on position and employment status. To view more details of the benefits offered, visit Myrjbenefits.com.

 

 

At Raymond James our associates use five guiding behaviors (Develop, Collaborate, Decide, Deliver, Improve) to deliver on the firm's core values of client-first, integrity, independence and a conservative, long-term view. 

We expect our associates at all levels to:
•  Grow professionally and inspire others to do the same
•  Work with and through others to achieve desired outcomes
•  Make prompt, pragmatic choices and act with the client in mind
•  Take ownership and hold themselves and others accountable for delivering results that matter
•  Contribute to the continuous evolution of the firm

At Raymond James – as part of our people-first culture, we honor, value, and respect the uniqueness, experiences, and backgrounds of all of our Associates.  When associates bring their best authentic selves, our organization, clients, and communities thrive. The Company is an equal opportunity employer and makes all employment decisions on the basis of merit and business needs. 

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