Lead Prompt Engineer – LLM Evaluation & AI Team Lead in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior leadership role in one of the fastest-growing niches in AI — LLM evaluation and automated rating systems. The focus on autoraters, APO tooling, and gold-data benchmarking places you at the cutting edge of how large AI labs and their vendors ensure model quality at scale.
Skills you'll develop and deepen:
- Advanced prompt engineering for classification and evaluation tasks (chain-of-thought, few-shot)
- LLM performance measurement: F1 scores, precision/recall, human-vs-model agreement analysis
- Team leadership and mentoring in a technical AI context
- Technical documentation (Launch Certification) — valuable for enterprise AI roles
Market context: Senior prompt engineers with 7+ years of experience are rare, and demand far exceeds supply. Roles at this level typically command $140,000–$190,000 annually in the US market, particularly in AI evaluation contexts tied to major tech clients. The absence of a disclosed salary is a mild red flag — candidates should negotiate firmly.
Green flags: The role involves genuine technical depth (APO deadlock analysis, shadowbot monitoring), not just prompt writing. Mentoring responsibilities add leadership credentials useful for Principal or Director-level moves.
Yellow flags: The work appears to be contractor or vendor-side (client tooling, migration project framing), which may mean limited long-term job security once migration is complete. Candidates should clarify project duration and potential for ongoing engagement before accepting.
We are looking for an experienced Lead Prompt Engineer to guide and manage a team through the full technical migration process, transitioning templates to LLM autoraters. In this role, you will leverage advanced prompt engineering techniques and the client's internal tools to optimize model performance, ensuring the successful integration and ongoing enhancement of AI systems. As the team lead, you will drive the strategy, mentor junior engineers, and play a key role in shaping the future of our AI-driven solutions.
Responsibilities
- Utilize Automatic Prompt Generation (APG) tools to create baseline prompts for complex parent-child template clusters.
- Run and supervise Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) tool, review the outputs, and flag when the APO reaches deadlocks or plateaus.
- Manually draft, test, and refine prompts to navigate complex template architectures, overcome anti-patterns, and handle edge cases where tooling is lacking or broken. Solve edge-case scenarios by designing and refining manual prompts.
- Monitor shadowbot runs to ensure sufficient disagreements (between human and LLM ratings) are registered, generated, and tracked.
- Run prompt versions against established gold data to continuously measure autorater quality against the human crowd baseline, calculating accuracy metrics such as F1 scores, precision, and recall.
- Draft technical launch readiness justifications (Launch Certification Documentation) for final approval.
Requirements
- Language Skills: Native fluency in English.
- Location: Must be based in the United States.
- Education: Master's or Doctorate degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Cognitive Science, or a related analytical field.
- Prompt Engineering & AI Expertise: At least 7 years' experience as a Prompt Engineer. Proven experience tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for strict, structured outputs, complex classification tasks, and familiarity with chain-of-thought and few-shot learning.
- Data Analysis: Strong proficiency in identifying error patterns, analyzing model performance, and using SQL or other data analytics tools.
- Technical Agility: Ability to quickly learn and master proprietary tools with minimal supervision.
- Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Optional / Preferred Skills
- Familiarity with enterprise-grade LLM interfaces like the Goose API.
- Experience in AI model evaluation, data science, computational linguistics, or software engineering.
- Hands-on experience with Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) systems or tuning workflows.
- Linguistic expertise, including an understanding of semantics and logic.
Additional Information
Federal Law Compliance
In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to:
- Verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States; and
- Complete a required employment eligibility verification form.
Please note that in order to verify work authorization as required by Federal law (I-9 process), all new employees must complete a live video verification with their selected IDs and provide photos of these selected IDs within their first 3 days of employment.
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