Lead AI Engineer

Nuveen, the investment manager of TIAA, offers a comprehensive range of outcome-focused investment solutions designed to secure the long-term financial goals of institutional and individual investors. Its affiliates offer deep expertise across a comprehensive range of traditional and alternative investments through a wide array of vehicles and customized strategies. For more information about the firm please visit our website at www.Nuveen.com. Nuveen is a global investment manager that works in partnership with our clients to create outcome-focused solutions to help them reach their goals for their financial future.

The Lead AI Engineer is a key technical leader and major contributor to a high-performing, fast-paced engineering team responsible for designing, building, and deploying enterprise-grade generative AI solutions. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, scalable architecture, and cutting-edge AI/ML technologies, with a focus on delivering production-ready applications on AWS using Python.

As a hands-on technical leader, you will be involved in the full software development lifecycle (SDLC), from requirements gathering and architecture design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing optimization. You will design robust, low-latency AI applications, implement best practices in DevOps and MLOps, and ensure all solutions meet enterprise standards for security, governance, and compliance.

Key Responsibilities and Duties

• Design and implement Generative AI solutions using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines. Build end-to-end systems integrating vector databases, embedding models, and LLMs to enable context-aware, knowledge-grounded responses.
• Develop robust prompting strategies, templates, and workflows that maximize LLM performance, accuracy, and consistency
• Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure model accuracy, latency, cost, hallucination rates, and task-specific performance metrics; conduct A/B testing and comparative analysis across models and configurations
• Implement comprehensive logging, tracing, and alerting systems to track model behavior, prompt-response patterns, token usage, errors, and drift in production environments
• Build production-grade AI agents using both low-code platforms and high-code custom implementations, using Langchain, Langgraph, and optimize for performance, and maintainability.
• Architect and develop large-scale, cloud-native Python applications using modern frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, optimized for high performance, low latency, and horizontal scalability
• Design distributed system architectures that leverage AWS services including Lambda , ECS/EKS , EC2 , S3 , DynamoDB , RDS/Aurora ), ElastiCache , OpenSearch , SQS , SNS , EventBridge , Step Functions , Bedrock , Textract and Domino/SageMaker platforms.
• Build responsive, intuitive user interfaces using React, TypeScript/JavaScript, and modern frontend frameworks to deliver seamless user experiences for AI-powered applications
• Implement API design best practices including RESTful principles, Open API/Swagger documentation, versioning strategies, rate limiting, authentication/authorization, and error handling
• Optimize application performance through caching strategies, asynchronous processing, connection pooling, efficient data serialization, and proactive bottleneck identification
• Design for reliability and resilience by implementing retry logic, circuit breakers, graceful degradation, health checks, and disaster recovery mechanisms
• Establish and enforce CI/CD best practices using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or AWS Code Pipeline to automate build, test, and deployment processes
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or CDK to enable consistent, version-controlled, and reproducible infrastructure provisioning
• Design and manage containerized applications using Docker for packaging and Kubernetes (EKS) or ECS for orchestration, ensuring efficient resource utilization and auto-scaling
• Implement robust testing strategies including unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, performance tests, and AI-specific testing (prompt regression tests, model output validation)
• Establish observability and monitoring frameworks using CloudWatch, Prometheus, or Langfuse, LangSmith to track system health, application performance, model behavior, and business metrics
• Apply security best practices including IAM, least-privilege access, role-based access control (RBAC), multi-factor authentication, enforce encryption at rest and in transit, secure key management, and data masking/tokenization for sensitive information. Configure VPCs, security groups, network ACLs, and private endpoints to minimize attack surface. Implement input validation, output encoding, SQL injection prevention, and secure API authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT).
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of system architectures, data flows, security controls, and operational procedures to support compliance audits and knowledge transfer.

Educational Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree Required

Work Experience

• 5+ Years Required; 7+ Years Preferred

Physical Requirements

• Physical Requirements: Sedentary Work

Career Level
9IC

Required Skills:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated progression in technical leadership and system design

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with AI/ML, with at least 1+ year focused on Generative AI, LLMs, and production deployment

• Expert-level Python programming with deep knowledge of advanced language features, design patterns, performance optimization, and popular frameworks (FastAPI, Flask, Pandas, NumPy). 

• Full-stack development skills including backend API development with RESTful design principles, frontend development using React JS, database design and optimization (SQL and NoSQL)

• Extensive AWS experience with hands-on implementation of compute, storage, networking, security, and AI/ML services.

• Production experience with Generative AI technologies: LLM APIs (Open AI or Anthropic Claude), RAG frameworks and vector databases, Prompt engineering and optimization techniques, AI agent frameworks (Lang Chain and Lang Graph), Model fine-tuning and evaluation

• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), Monitoring and observability tools

• Understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, event-driven design, and scalability patterns

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with MLOps platforms (Domino platform, Sage Maker Pipelines, ML flow)

• Experience with additional cloud platforms (Azure, GCP) and multi-cloud architectures

• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or published research

• Knowledge of additional programming languages (C++, Go, Rust)

• Experience with real-time streaming and event-driven architecture

• Familiarity with advanced AI techniques (multimodal models, vision transformers, diffusion models)

• Good communication and technical writing skills

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, Machine Learning Specialty) preferred

Related Skills

Agile Methodology, Continuous Integration and Deployment, Data Analysis, Debugging, DevOps, Enterprise Application Integration, Operating Systems Management, Problem Solving, Programming, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle, Web Application Development

Anticipated Posting End Date:

2026-04-22

Base Pay Range: $123,000/yr - $168,000/yr

Actual base salary may vary based upon, but not limited to, relevant experience, time in role, base salary of internal peers, prior performance, business sector, and geographic location.  In addition to base salary, the competitive compensation package may include, depending on the role, participation in an incentive program linked to performance (for example, annual discretionary incentive programs, non-annual sales incentive plans, or other non-annual incentive plans). 

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Company Overview

Nuveen is a global investment leader, managing public and private assets for clients around the world and on behalf of TIAA, our parent company and one of the world’s largest institutional investors. We invest in the growth of businesses, real estate, infrastructure and natural capital, providing clients with the reliability, access and foresight unique to our heritage. Our prevailing perspective on the future drives our ambition to innovate and adapt our business to the changing needs of investors - all to pursue lasting performance for our clients, our communities and our global economy. Visit www.nuveen.com to learn more about us.

Our Culture of Impact

At TIAA, we're on a mission to build on our 100+ year legacy of delivering for our clients while evolving to meet tomorrow's challenges. We equip our associates with future-focused skills and AI tools that enable us to advance our mission. Together, we are fighting to ensure a more secure financial future for all and for generations to come. We are guided by our values: Champion Our People, Be Client Obsessed, Lead with Integrity, Own It, and Win As One. They influence every decision we make and how we work together to serve our clients every day. We thrive in a collaborative in-office environment where teams work across organizational boundaries with shared purpose, accelerating innovation and delivering meaningful results. Our workplace brings together TIAA and Nuveen's entrepreneurial spirit, where we work hard and work together to create lasting impact. Here, every associate can grow through meaningful learning experiences and development pathways—because when our people succeed, our impact on clients' lives grows stronger.

Benefits and Total Rewards

The organization is committed to making financial well-being possible for its clients, and is equally committed to the well-being of our associates. That’s why we offer a comprehensive Total Rewards package designed to make a positive difference in the lives of our associates and their loved ones. Our benefits include a superior retirement program and highly competitive health, wellness and work life offerings that can help you achieve and maintain your best possible physical, emotional and financial well-being. To learn more about your benefits, please review our Benefits Summary.

Equal Opportunity

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. TIAA does not discriminate against any candidate or employee on the basis of age, race, color, national origin, sex, religion, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other legally protected status.

Our full EEO & Non-Discrimination statement is on our careers home page, and you can read more about your rights and view government notices here.

Accessibility Support

TIAA offers support for those who need assistance with our online application process to provide an equal employment opportunity to all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. 

If you are a U.S. applicant and desire a reasonable accommodation to complete a job application please use one of the below options to contact our accessibility support team: 

Phone: (800) 842-2755

Email: accessibility.support@tiaa.org

Drug and Smoking Policy

TIAA maintains a drug-free and smoke/free workplace.

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