Principal AI Engineer - QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey

Who You'll Work With

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
  
  

Your Impact

You will lead the design, development, and enterprise-scale deployment of innovative AI solutions, including agentic AI platforms, applications, and use cases, by combining advanced software development practices with robust data engineering expertise.

You will own the technical delivery of complex client engagements, setting the architectural direction and leading multidisciplinary engineering teams while remaining hands-on with critical technical challenges.

You will collaborate with a global network of technologists, data scientists, and industry experts to help clients transform their businesses through advanced analytics and AI-driven solutions. You will guide teams developing scalable data pipelines, cutting-edge software products, and agentic applications, ensuring their integration, production readiness, and adoption across client technology environments. You will contribute to the development of AI models while mentoring internal and client teams and shaping engineering cultures.

You will take on diverse and impactful responsibilities that blend technical expertise with strategic collaboration. You will define end-to-end solution architectures and lead technical delivery across interconnected workstreams, including scalable, modular, and reproducible data pipelines tailored for machine learning and AI applications, and software products and services that are maintainable, scalable, and secure. You will lead the design, development, integration, and extension of agentic AI platforms and use cases, making and guiding technical choices across application architecture, AI orchestration, model integration, data access, APIs, security, evaluation, and deployment. Collaborating with cross-functional teams, you will assess client data landscapes, ensure data quality, and guide integration with enterprise systems. You will resolve complex cross-workstream dependencies and production issues, balancing scalability, reliability, delivery speed, cost, and long-term maintainability. Your work will also involve managing secure data environments and contributing to research and development initiatives, as well as internal asset development.

Beyond technical execution, you will act as a trusted technical advisor to senior client technology stakeholders, helping define implementation approaches, evaluate architectural options, and make pragmatic trade-offs aligned with business priorities. You will lead technical discussions and cross-functional problem-solving sessions with client leaders, helping shape their digital strategies and delivering solutions that extend beyond the product itself. You will be accountable for integrated technical delivery across an engagement, providing direction to software engineers, data engineers, data scientists, and other specialists, and ensuring successful deployment and operationalization of agentic AI use cases in client environments. A key part of your work will be developing internal and client engineering talent through mentoring, technical reviews, knowledge transfer, and the adoption of engineering best practices, user-centric design, and Agile values. By partnering with QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey and QuantumBlack Labs teams, you will help create cutting-edge machine learning systems that accelerate AI adoption and solve complex business problems at scale.

You will also shape engineering standards, reusable assets, and delivery practices across engagements, using lessons from client implementations to improve solution quality, deployment efficiency, and the evolution of agentic AI platforms and products. You will help teams validate performance, security, resilience, observability, and operational readiness, with structured handovers that enable clients to maintain and extend deployed solutions.

Your Qualifications and Skills

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of professional experience building and deploying data solutions and software products, including demonstrated ownership of complex, enterprise-grade AI or software delivery
• Strong hands-on coding skills in Python (ability to review designs, develop complex components, and resolve technical issues), with Scala or Java experience as a plus
• Hands-on experience working with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Dask) and analytics libraries (e.g., pandas, numpy, matplotlib)
• Solid expertise in containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes for scalable production systems
• Experience applying modern pipeline practices to production delivery using technologies such as Python, PySpark, SQL, Airflow, Databricks, Kedro, Dask/RAPIDS, Docker, Kubernetes, and major cloud services
• Experience taking complex enterprise solutions into production (performance/resilience testing, observability, troubleshooting, secure infrastructure, and operational handover), including regulated or hybrid environments
• Exposure to AI modeling frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, Scikit-Learn) combined with familiarity with AI Governance, Safety, Responsible AI practices, and safety guardrails
• Demonstrated ability to advise senior client stakeholders on technology architecture, translate complex trade-offs into practical recommendations, and mentor/coach engineers to build capabilities