AI Technical Lead

Your Journey at Crowe Starts Here: At Crowe, you can build a meaningful and rewarding career. With real flexibility to balance work with life moments, you’re trusted to deliver results and make an impact. We embrace you for who you are, care for your well-being, and nurture your career. Everyone has equitable access to opportunities for career growth and leadership. Over our 80-year history, delivering excellent service through innovation has been a core part of our DNA across our audit, tax, and consulting groups. That’s why we continuously invest in innovative ideas, such as AI-enabled insights and technology-powered solutions, to enhance our services. Join us at Crowe and embark on a career where you can help shape the future of our industry. Job Description: About Crowe AI Everything we do is about making the future of human work more purposeful. We do this by leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning, generative AI, modern architectures, and industry experts to create AI-powered solutions that transform the way we do business. Our world-class AI and ML professionals give Crowe the ability to capture and harness the power of data. A combination of AI and Machine Learning Engineers and AI Platform and Infrastructure Engineers create and deploy AI functionality to solve complex problems. We focus on building scalable AI solutions, based on rigorous data exploration, validation via proof-of-concept buildout, and close partnership with subject matter experts across business areas. The future is powered by AI, come build it with us. Role Overview Crowe’s Studio team is seeking an AI Tech Lead to serve as a hands-on technical leader for the design, development, and lifecycle management of AI agents that accelerate the delivery of Crowe’s Audit services. This role is built around Crowe’s forward deployed engineer (FDE) model: rather than sitting above a project as a traditional program manager, this person sits with Audit practitioners, learns the workflow, designs the agent as it is built, and owns the outcome end to end. The goal is to establish the technical patterns, Skills-based architecture, and engineering practices needed to support a growing portfolio of agents. As that portfolio grows, the role is expected to grow into leading a small team as an engineering manager with full-stack engineers who each own a slice of the roadmap. Key Responsibilities Delivery of Audit AI Agents • Own the design, development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of AI agents and agent-assisted workflows that accelerate the execution of common tasks across Crowe’s Audit practice. • Operate as a forward deployed engineer paired directly with an Audit SME — sitting with practitioners, learning the workflow firsthand, and designing the agent as it is built rather than from a static spec. • Remain hands-on in development: write, review, test, and maintain substantial Python codebases and the Skills, instructions, prompts, and supporting resources that define agent behavior. • Manage project scope, timelines, and stakeholder communication for the agents you own — balancing hands-on delivery with the planning, prioritization, and coordination expected of a senior technical lead. • Design and develop agents using a Skills-based architecture — modular, reusable capabilities that can be efficiently discovered, invoked, tested, maintained, and enhanced over time. • Serve as the technical authority for the agent layer, making key design and implementation decisions while partnering with architects and engineering teams to ensure alignment with the broader Audit technology ecosystem. • Implement and maintain monitoring, observability, and alerting for agents running in production, including trace-level visibility into agent reasoning and tool calls, to proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues. Build and Scale the Engineering Capability • Establish reusable engineering patterns and development practices that let a growing portfolio of agents be developed, evaluated, deployed, supported, and enhanced sustainably. • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps to automate testing, evaluation, and deployment of agents across environments. • As the portfolio grows, lead a small team of forward deployed engineers that advance the roadmap per the audit stakeholders they serve. • Participate in the development and evolution of agent evaluation strategies, including representative test cases, automated evaluators, regression testing, quantifiable accuracy metrics, and processes for identifying and addressing changes in agent behavior. • Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership, including code and design reviews, as the agent portfolio and supporting team grow. • Promote collaboration across the Audit BU and the broader Studio to surface opportunities, share reusable patterns, and avoid duplicated build effort. Product Judgment • Think in terms of ROI, business case, and value pool for every initiative, defining and tracking KPIs to measure and communicate business impact; make product decisions directly alongside the SME rather than routing through a separate product owner. • Demonstrate a solutions-oriented approach: be proactive, identify solutions independently, initiate activities, and follow through to completion. • Leverage data and insights to shape and defend a point of view aligned to Audit’s business needs. • Communicate proficiently with both technical staff and business leaders, articulating complex ideas, strategies, and recommendations in terms each audience can act on. Required Qualifications • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience developing, implementing, and supporting enterprise applications and services. • 5+ years of professional Python development experience, with a strong track record of building enterprise-grade applications and services. • Demonstrated ability to write clean, maintainable, modular, testable, and well-structured Python code des