AI Team Lead

McCarthy Holdings, Inc. (McCarthy) , is the holding entity for McCarthy Building Companies, Inc., the oldest privately-held national construction company in America, and Castle Contracting. McCarthy provides the crucial business infrastructure for these entities and connects the day-to-day operations to ensure seamless operations across the business. Repeatedly honored as a great place to work and healthiest employer, McCarthy is a 100 percent employee-owned company .
At McCarthy, we are committed to sustaining a culture that delivers great experiences for everyone. This begins with developing high-performing individuals and teams through our award-winning learning and development programs, best-in-class Total Rewards benefits, and our inclusive culture aligned with our core values: Genuine . We, Not I . All In.
How do McCarthy partners define our culture?

We Live Our Core Values: We do whatever it takes to deliver on our promises with honesty and integrity.
We are Employee Owned: We are personally invested in building the things people need in our communities.
We Feel Like a Family: We value genuine connections and help each other succeed in an inclusive environment.
We are Builders: We respect the work we do and everyone who helps make it happen safely.

Position Summary
As the AI Team Lead, you will partner closely with the AI Manager to deliver McCarthy’s AI capabilities from concept through production. You will lead a team of AI engineers while remaining hands-on in the development of feature pipelines, models, and AI applications.
This role bridges strategy and execution: translating architectural direction into scalable implementations, ensuring engineering quality, and helping the team deliver reliable AI systems that integrate seamlessly with McCarthy’s broader data and technology ecosystem.
You will oversee technical delivery, mentor engineers, guide solution design, and ensure AI solutions meet standards for performance, security, transparency, and responsible AI governance.
Responsibilities

Lead the day-to-day delivery of AI initiatives, coordinating engineering work across multiple projects and use cases
Translate architectural direction from the AI Architect into actionable technical designs and implementation plans
Guide the development of scalable AI solutions including data pipelines, model pipelines, and generative AI systems
Mentor and support AI engineers through technical coaching, code reviews, and problem solving
Provide clear direction, coaching, and ongoing feedback to AI team members, fostering a culture of learning, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
Develop team members through structured goal setting, regular 1-on-1s, and tailored development plans, ensuring they grow in both technical depth and leadership capability.
Establish and reinforce engineering best practices for AI development, including testing, version control, monitoring, and reproducibility
Ensure MLOps and PromptOps processes are implemented consistently across the team
Oversee the lifecycle of AI systems including model training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
Coordinate with data engineering, platform, and application teams to ensure reliable data access and system integration
Support responsible AI governance by embedding transparency, auditability, and human oversight into deployed solutions
Partner with business stakeholders to translate operational needs into technical AI solutions
Identify opportunities to scale successful AI solutions across teams and projects

Qualifications

5–8 years of experience in AI/ML engineering, data science, or data engineering
1–3 years of technical leadership or project leadership experience guiding engineering teams or complex AI initiatives, with a focus on day-to-day coaching, removing obstacles, and helping team members progress in their roles while partnering closely with the manager on priorities.
Strong people-leadership skills suited to a team led role, including giving candid, constructive feedback, mentoring emerging talent and reinforcing a high-performance team culture aligned with the organization’s strategy and vision.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)

Technical expertise includes:

Strong data engineering experience (ETL pipelines, Spark, cloud data platforms, SQL/NoSQL, APIs)
Experience developing and deploying machine learning models and generative AI systems
Proficiency in Python (pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, NLP frameworks)
Experience working with LLM ecosystems and generative AI tooling (OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, etc.)
Experience building AI applications that integrate structured and unstructured data sources
Familiarity with MLOps practices including model versioning, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability
Experience managing prompt engineering workflows and prompt lifecycle management
Understanding of agentic AI systems and the governance considerations associated with autonomous or semi-autonomous systems
Experience deploying solutions in cloud environments and AI/ML platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, serverless architectures)

Characteristics:

Strong technical leadership with the ability to guide engineers while remaining hands-on
Ability to translate complex architectural concepts into clear engineering tasks
Excellent collaboration skills across engineering, platform, and business teams
Comfortable operating in rapidly evolving AI environments and emerging technology landscapes
Strategic mindset paired with strong execution discipline
High levels of ownership, accountability, and engineering rigor
Strong mentoring mindset with a commitment to growing the team’s technical capabilities
Commitment to responsible AI practices including transparency, explainability, and human oversight

McCarthy is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, including disability and protected veteran status.
NOTICE TO EXTERNAL SEARCH FIRMS: McCarthy’s Talent Acquisition Team is the only authorized representative permitted to engage with external search firms, staffing agencies, or other third-party recruiting partners. McCarthy maintains an Approved Agency List for recruiting partners, which is reviewed and updated annually.
McCarthy will only consider submissions from agencies with a signed fee agreement in place for the current year. McCarthy does not accept unsolicited resumes, candidate submissions, or referrals from agencies that do not meet these requirements.
If a candidate is submitted without an active agreement, McCarthy will have no obligation to pay any fees and reserves the right to contact, engage, interview, or hire such candidate(s) without any financial or other responsibility to the submitting agency. Unsolicited resumes, including those sent directly to hiring managers or other employees, will be considered the property of McCarthy.