Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer – AI in SDLC & Platform Engineering

The Future of Hospitality is Agentic. Join Us.

At IHG Hotels & Resorts, we are not just hosting guests; we are pioneering the next generation of hospitality technology. As a Lead AI Engineer, you will be at the forefront of our most ambitious technical shift: integrating Agentic AI into the very fabric of our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

We are looking for a visionary engineer who thrives at the intersection of LLMs, autonomous systems, and enterprise-scale DevOps. Your mission is to move us beyond simple automation toward a truly intelligent, self-optimizing SDLC ecosystem.

The Role: Architect, Builder, and Catalyst

As a Lead on the team, your primary focus will be the end-to-end lifecycle of AI Agents. You won't just be prototyping; you will be building production-grade intelligence that accelerates how we deliver features to millions of guests worldwide.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design & Operate: Architect, debug, and manage high-performance AI agents that support every phase of the SDLC—from requirement analysis and code generation to automated testing and cloud deployment.

• Accelerate Delivery: Identify bottlenecks in our current delivery pipelines and engineer AI-driven solutions to radically compress lead times for feature delivery.

• Define the Archetype: Continuously evolve our "AI Agent Archetype." As technology and industry standards shift, you will refine the building blocks, security guardrails, and operational frameworks that define what an agent is at IHG.

• Cross-Pollinate Innovation: Act as a technical bridge across IHG’s global engineering pods. You will share best practices, harvest successful patterns from individual teams, and scale them across the enterprise.

• Industry Liaison: Stay ahead of the curve. You will keep IHG at the cutting edge by integrating emerging AI research and tools into our internal ways of working.

What We Are Looking For

• The "Agent" Mindset: Deep experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI) and a proven track record of building agents that do more than just "chat"—they act.

• SDLC Mastery: You understand how software is built at scale. You are comfortable in the worlds of GitHub Cloud, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native infrastructure.

• Systems Thinker: You don't just solve isolated bugs; you design systems that prevent them. You are passionate about testing non-deterministic outcomes and securing AI at scale.

• Collaborative Leader: You can translate complex AI concepts into actionable strategies for product owners and developers alike.

Why IHG?

You will be part of a team that values Innovation, Security, and Scale. This is an opportunity to re-imagine the SDLC for one of the world's largest hotel companies, impacting thousands of developers and millions of travelers.