Lead AI Developer

About the role

If you have what it takes to become part of the Vistra family and would like to start a promising career with a global leader, take a look at the exciting employment opportunities that are currently available and apply online.

Job Summary

The Lead AI Developer will be responsible for building production AI agents, shape team-level governance, and raise AI engineering maturity across web, mobile, CMS, and MarTech platforms serving millions of retail energy customers.

About the role

• Drive the maintenance of systems, creation of technical designs, development and deployment of front-end and/or back-end systems, integration of the data warehouse with enterprise applications, and/or implementation of user access controls and data security measures, where appropriate.
• Lead daily operational activities and measure process quality and compliance.
• Identify, evaluate, and implement automation and continuous improvement ideas supporting ITIL-aligned processes to address technical debt.
• Manage the creation and implementation of solutions or enhancements to improve overall Vistra data architecture; conduct research and make recommendations on new data management processes and innovations.
• Engage business users, process owners, architecture, and application teams to define and understand data needs to achieve key performance indicators and service level agreements that benefit Vistra and its objectives.
• Drive creation of policies, standards, guidelines and procedures that mitigate risk and optimize performance in order to ensure data is available, responsive, and achieving business outcomes and objectives.
• Approach development with a test-driven mindset, utilizing well structured unit tests.
• Analyze code for non-standard practices, errors, and security vulnerabilities and present detailed plans to improve and transform the code to optimize performance and ease of use.
• Manage cross-team initiatives related to the platforms supported by the team.
• Apply the value drivers for Vistra to deliver innovative value creation ideas.
• Identify opportunities to increase the adoption and communication of TS processes through training and engagement.
• Participate in agile ceremonies.
• Provide domain guidance to less experienced team members.
• Apply understanding of financial principles impacting the applications supported by the team and contribute to the business case development for new ideas.

Education, Experience, & Skill Requirements

• 10-12 years professional experience in a technology or business field
• Professional certifications a plus (e.g., ITIL, CSM, AWS)
• Proven experience analyzing code for non-standard practices, errors, and security vulnerabilities and presenting detailed remediation plans.
• Experience managing and delivering departmental initiatives related to the platforms supported by the team.
• Experience driving the maintenance of systems, creation of technical designs, and development and deployment of front-end and/or back-end systems.
• Demonstrated ability to be trustworthy and dependable
• Ability to learn quickly, be self motivated to improve knowledge and tackle new challenges
• Superior organizational skills, communication skills, and attention to detail required
• Skilled at creating executive-level communications and presenting to and interacting with leaders
• Must demonstrate an energetic, hands-on, enthusiastic, results-oriented approach as a team player, capable of adding significant value to the existing team.
• Must be comfortable sharing ideas and finding innovative ways to resolve challenges.
• Proven ability to build support among peers and create relationships with peers and stakeholders.

*Experience gained through a college degree program and/or business certifications may apply to the skills above

Key Metrics

• System availability
• Process compliance
• Data availability
• Data quality
• Agile delivery proficiency
• Ticket volumes and trending
• Deep understanding of LLMs, context windows, prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, and vector search.
• Hands-on experience with agent architectures, MCP, function calling, and tool-use patterns.
• Strong TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, and Python for production engineering.
• Experience with GitHub Copilot, Agent Mode, custom instructions, and prompt files.
• Working knowledge of enterprise CMS, CDP, MarTech, Snowflake, and Azure DevOps.
• Understanding of AI governance, PII handling, output validation, and prompt injection mitigation.

• Job Family
• Information Technology