AI Lead Developer

Job Summary

The AI Lead Developer is a hands-on individual-contributor role at the Advisor level that designs, builds, and supports production-quality AI solutions for Continental Resources. The role calls for an experienced, seasoned developer with extensive hands-on Databricks experience, since Databricks is central to how Continental builds AI and data solutions. Depending on the need, the AI Lead Developer may lead a group of developers or may oversee and advise their work and efforts, while setting AI development standards and helping teams across IT and the business move AI ideas into supportable production solutions.

Duties and Responsibilities

- Lead, mentor, and train developers. Depending on the need, this may mean leading a group of developers or overseeing and advising their work, with clear expectations for quality, documentation, delivery, and use of Cursor and AI-assisted development.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support AI applications, ai assisted development, agents, and workflows, writing production code directly, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool and function calling, agent orchestration, structured output, and human-in-the-loop review.
- Build and maintain AI and data solutions on Databricks, including notebooks, jobs, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake and medallion lakehouse pipelines, and Genie and Mosaic AI agents.
- Integrate solutions with enterprise systems through APIs, Glean, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph, SQL Server, and SharePoint, and develop Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and connectors that meet approved security standards.
- Set and maintain AI development standards, including coding conventions, templates, reference implementations, consistent guardrails across platforms, and a definition of done, and lead code and design reviews.
- Apply evaluation and testing practices, including test sets, quality thresholds, regression checks, and monitoring of accuracy, cost, and latency, and evaluate emerging AI tools and models through focused pilots.
- Define AI-assisted SDLC, branching, CI/CD, and environment promotion practices using Git, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins, and coordinate change control for production deployments.
- Build security and responsible AI practices into every solution, including least-privilege access, secrets management, prompt-injection and data-leakage safeguards, audit logging, and human oversight, and confirm clear support ownership before production release.
- Guide developers and citizen developers across IT and the business on approved AI patterns, tools, and data access, harden promising solutions for support, and move citizen-built solutions into IT ownership when risk or scale requires it.
- Partner with business stakeholders and IT teams to understand oil and gas workflows, identify where AI adds measurable value, translate needs into technical approaches, and explain AI capabilities and limits in plain language.
- Resolve production issues, participate in the shared on-call rotation, and maintain technical documentation and runbooks.

- Direct and oversee contractors and implementation partners, review their work, and ensure knowledge transfer to CLR employees.
- Other duties as assigned.

Skills and Competencies

- Excellent written and verbal communication, including explaining technical tradeoffs to nontechnical audiences and leadership.
- Strong, current hands-on skills in Python, C#, TypeScript, or similar languages, with recent work examples to share.
- Experience integrating applications with REST APIs, SQL databases, and enterprise systems, including authentication, error handling, and logging.
- Working knowledge of secure development and responsible AI practices, including access control, secrets handling, and data privacy.
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with the ability to manage multiple priorities.
- Strong talent development, collaboration, accountability, results orientation, and learning agility.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum ten (10) years of recent software development, application development, or systems integration experience as a seasoned, hands-on developer delivering applications to production.
- At least two (2) years of hands-on experience building AI or LLM-based solutions, such as RAG, agents, or AI-enabled workflows, from prototype through production.
- Extensive hands-on Databricks experience, including notebooks, jobs, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake and medallion lakehouse architecture, and Genie and Mosaic AI agents.
- Full stack development experience, including front-end web frameworks (such as React or Angular), back-end services and APIs, and relational databases.
- Hands-on, daily experience with AI coding agents such as Cursor, Codex, or Claude Code, with sound judgment in reviewing and validating generated code.
- Experience with Git, CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps and Jenkins), Docker, and modern software engineering practices.
- Demonstrated experience leading or mentoring developers, including setting standards, reviewing code, and guiding design decisions.
- Experience with large, complex initiatives involving in-house development teams, commercial off the shelf applications, or software vendors.
- An acceptable pre-employment background and drug test.

Preferred Qualifications

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, or a related field; equivalent hands-on experience is fully acceptable in place of a degree.
- Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, or similar models, and with enterprise AI platforms such as Glean.
- Experience with Cursor specifically, including rules, skills, MCP, and agent workflows.
- Experience with AWS and Azure cloud services (such as Lambda, S3, and Bedrock on AWS, or App Service, Functions, and Entra ID on Azure) and building secure, scalable web applications.
- Experience with vector databases, embeddings, and governed MCP tool integrations.
- Experience combining MuleSoft, UiPath, or Power Platform with AI, and guiding citizen development programs.
- Experience with business solutions common in the Oil and Gas Industry, such as: Procount / eVIN / Carte, Peloton Suite, Aries, OFM, SAP ECC and PRA, Allegro, Quorum Land; exposure to SAP S/4HANA is a plus.

Physical Requirements and Working Conditions

- Requires prolonged sitting, some bending and stooping.
- Occasional lifting up to 25 pounds.
- Manual dexterity sufficient to operate a computer keyboard and calculator.
- This is a fully onsite position at the Continental Oil Center in Oklahoma City, OK. No regular travel is required.
- This position requires participation in an on-call rotation schedule to provide support outside of normal business hours as needed.

Continental Resources, Inc. provides equal employment and affirmative action opportunities to applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or disability.