Senior Lead AI Engineer

About the role

IFS is hiring a Senior Lead AI Engineer in Colombo, a squad leader responsible for mentoring squad members and ensuring conformance to GCS AI Engineering technical architecture, governance and processes. The role drives innovation across the squad's AI use cases while aligning with enterprise strategy and acts as an authority on AI systems and agentic platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design of complex, large-scale, multi-agent systems
• Influence engineering standards, governance models and development frameworks
• Act as technical expert across AI Engineering initiatives and influence technical direction across multiple teams and portfolios
• Mentor AI engineers within the squad
• Drive innovation by evaluating emerging technologies and approaches
• Ensure alignment with responsible AI principles, security and compliance

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, mathematics, statistics or a related technical field; a Master's is an added advantage
• 8-10+ years of software engineering experience
• Equivalent practical experience with software engineering and AI/ML
• Practical AI/ML or LLM application experience and evidence of continuous learning
• Understanding of data handling and AI model behaviour

Required skills

• Enterprise AI architecture and distributed systems
• AI platforms, LLM ecosystems and agentic systems
• CI/CD pipelines (Bitbucket Pipelines, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
• Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or Bicep)
• Microsoft Azure (compute, storage, networking, cost optimization)
• Test automation practices and tools

Value additions include prior exposure to enterprise SaaS platforms and large-scale AI/ML deployments, familiarity with IFS industry domains, executive-level customer engagement experience and hands-on CI/CD and IaC experience. The company offers flexible and hybrid work arrangements.