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About This Role
WHAT MAKES US A GREAT PLACE TO WORK
We are proud to be consistently recognized as one of the world’s best places to work. We are currently the top ranked consulting firm on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work list and have earned the \#1 overall spot a record seven times.
Extraordinary teams are at the heart of our business strategy, but these don’t happen by chance. They require intentional focus on bringing together a broad set of backgrounds, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and skills in a supportive and inclusive work environment. We hire people with exceptional talent and create an environment in which every individual can thrive professionally and personally.
WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH
As the premier consulting partner for the private equity industry, Bain's PEG boasts a global practice that is over three times larger than any competitor. Our network of over 1,000 professionals supports private equity and institutional investor clients through every stage of the investment life cycle, from deal generation and due diligence to portfolio value creation and exit planning.
Bain \& Company is developing a suite of cutting\-edge data and software solutions designed to revolutionize how the private equity industry uses data for investment insights and decision\-making.
The PEG Innovation team's mission is to create analytical solutions for Bain clients, teams, and the broader institutional investor space using proprietary software and data products. This includes the development, commercialization, and daily management of Bain's proprietary datasets, data, and software businesses.
WHERE YOU’LL FIT WITHIN THE TEAM
Full\-Stack AI Product Engineers build and deliver end\-to\-end AI product experiences across the PE due diligence platform. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering and applied AI, combining solid full\-stack software engineering with practical knowledge of how LLMs and agentic systems behave in production.
You will build intelligent product features from backend services through frontend experience, contributing to the workflows, orchestration layers, and user interfaces that make AI useful, reliable, and intuitive for end users. This includes implementing agent workflows, retrieval pipelines, evaluation gates, human\-in\-the\-loop review patterns, and the analyst\-facing experiences that surface them. You are technically strong in production AI systems and capable of translating non\-deterministic model behavior into clear, trustworthy product experiences with guidance from senior engineers.
You will contribute to engineering standards, participate in code reviews, and grow your expertise in building safe, observable, and scalable AI\-powered workflows.
This role is TypeScript\-first. Most of the analyst\-facing product surfaces and Node.js services on the Workstream team are built in TypeScript, and we expect this engineer to own and extend that stack end\-to\-end. Python remains a strong co\-requirement for the AI orchestration and backend layer (LangGraph, FastAPI, agent services), so candidates must be comfortable working productively across both ecosystems even where TypeScript is their primary depth.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Full\-Stack AI Product Engineering (65%)
- Build end\-to\-end AI product features across backend services, orchestration layers, and frontend user experiences.
- Develop analyst\-facing and internal AI interfaces for workflows such as deal screening, commercial due diligence research, document extraction, and portfolio monitoring.
- Build responsive, high\-quality frontend experiences for streaming AI responses, structured outputs, source grounding, review and approval flows, and human\-in\-the\-loop interactions.
- Implement full\-stack application patterns for chat, copilot, workspace, and review\-based AI experiences, including state management, real\-time updates, and error handling.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, and domain stakeholders to translate AI capabilities into intuitive, polished user experiences.
- Contribute to stable contracts between frontend applications and AI/backend services, ensuring outputs are structured, testable, and resilient.
- Support contribution workflows and product surfaces for the Prompt Execution Sandbox and AI Artifact Studio, enabling safe and scalable use by non\-engineers where required.
- Ensure AI product features are accessible, observable, and production\-ready, with attention to usability, reliability, and edge\-case handling.
AI Platform and Agent Workflow Engineering (35%)
- Contribute to the Agent Gateway service, including inbound APIs, model routing, context management, response validation, and cost/audit logging.
- Build and maintain LangGraph agent workflows for PE use cases, including streaming, tool\-calling, multi\-step execution, and human\-in\-the\-loop interrupt patterns.
- Integrate Temporal durable execution with LangGraph, including workflow and activity authoring, checkpointing strategies, retry and backoff policies, and signal/query handling.
- Contribute to AI platform services such as Agent Session Manager, Memory Service, HITL Coordination Service, and Feedback/Correction Service.
- Implement RAG pipelines, including chunking strategies, embedding model selection, vector store integration, re\-ranking, and retrieval quality evaluation.
- Support evaluation and regression gates, including golden dataset management, metric definition, qualitative and quantitative evaluation, and CI enforcement on quality regressions.
- Implement context window management strategies such as token budgeting, truncation/compression, and tool\-call state persistence to support reliability in longer\-running workflows.
- Instrument AI services with structured logging, traces, and metrics to support operational dashboards and alerts for latency, quality, cost, and failure signals.
- Support deployment and operation of AI workloads in Kubernetes, including containerization and Helm\-based deployment patterns.
Collaboration and Engineering Standards
- Participate in code reviews and contribute to engineering standards for production AI product engineering across testing, evaluation, documentation, and maintainability.
- Collaborate with Data Platform on feature store access patterns, inference integration, schemas, and data contracts.
- Work with Product Engineering and Design on AI feature surfacing, including streaming experiences, structured output rendering, citation and evidence UX, and HITL review interfaces.
- Use AI coding assistants to accelerate prototyping and development, while validating all production artifacts against testing and evaluation gates before promotion.
- Document agent behavior specifications, tool contracts, and product interaction patterns so behavior is explicit, reviewable, and maintainable.
ABOUT YOU
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 3\+ years of experience building production software, including experience delivering full\-stack applications and/or AI\-enabled systems in production environments.
- Of those years, demonstrable production experience with TypeScript across both frontend and backend (or significant TypeScript backend depth) \- not just exposure as a frontend layer on top of a Python service. Python experience is required as a secondary language and can be at a working/contributing level rather than primary depth.
- Experience contributing to user\-facing AI product features, from backend services through frontend implementation.
- Experience working with agentic systems in production or pre\-production, including tool calling, multi\-step workflows, RAG, or structured output handling.
- Exposure to evaluation frameworks, including golden datasets, regression gates, or CI controls for quality assurance.
- Experience working with containerized environments such as Docker and Kubernetes, including familiarity with monitoring and reliability practices.
Full\-Stack Product Engineering
- Experience building modern full\-stack applications with frontend architecture and backend integration.
- Strong TypeScript proficiency as the primary language for full\-stack work: Component\-based UI development, strict TypeScript (strict mode, generics, discriminated unions), API integration, and application state management. Comfortable owning non\-trivial frontend architecture decisions, not just consuming patterns set by others.
- Production experience building TypeScript/Node.js backend services (Express, Bun, Koa, Fastify, NestJS, or equivalent) with end\-to\-end type\-safe API contracts (tRPC, Zod, OpenAPI codegen, or similar). Comfortable owning the boundary between TypeScript frontends and TypeScript and/or Python backends.
- Familiarity with the modern TypeScript tooling stack: yarn, pnpm, or npm workspaces, ESLint, Prettier, Vitest or Jest, and build tooling (Vite, Turbopack, esbuild). Treats type\-safety, linting, and testing as production requirements, not optional polish.
- Experience building product experiences for workflows such as tables, document\-centric interfaces, review flows, or real\-time/streaming interactions.
- Understanding of UX patterns for AI systems, including confidence indicators, citations/source grounding, fallback states, edit/retry patterns, and human review steps.
- Good product sense in translating non\-deterministic AI behavior into usable and trustworthy product experiences.
AI Platform Engineering
- Working Python proficiency as a strong co\-requirement (secondary to TypeScript), including FastAPI, Pydantic v2, async patterns, and pytest. Expectation: comfortable contributing to and reviewing Python services and LangGraph/agent service work.
- Hands\-on experience with LangChain and/or LangGraph, including stateful graph construction, tool integration, checkpointing, and streaming patterns.
- Familiarity with Google ADK or equivalent agentic orchestration frameworks is a plus.
- Exposure to Temporal or similar durable execution frameworks, including workflow/activity authoring and retry patterns.
- Prompt engineering skills, including structured output design, system prompt construction, instruction clarity, and multi\-turn context management.
- Experience implementing or contributing to RAG pipelines, including chunking, embedding selection, vector store integration, and retrieval quality evaluation.
- Familiarity with LLM evaluation approaches, including golden dataset design, metric definition, and regression gate concepts.
- Awareness of context window management strategies such as token budgeting, truncation, and tool\-call state persistence.
- Familiarity with vector databases such as pgvector and/or OpenSearch.
- Experience with Docker and familiarity with Kubernetes deployment concepts.
Generative AI and Agentic Systems
- Uses AI coding assistants such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot as part of the development workflow, while applying judgement about where generated code is reliable versus where it requires scrutiny.
- Familiarity with multi\-agent system concepts including orchestration logic, tool interfaces, and failure\-handling patterns.
- Capable of contributing to evaluation pipelines that combine deterministic metrics with LLM\-as\-judge patterns for qualitative assessment.
- Able to review AI\-generated code, including Kubernetes manifests, prompts, and agent graphs, for correctness and safety before production release.
General
- Understands non\-determinism as a first\-class engineering challenge and contributes to systems that degrade gracefully when model outputs are unexpected.
- Writes evaluation tests before shipping new AI capabilities, not after.
- Prototypes quickly using AI tooling, but validates production artifacts against defined quality gates before promotion.
- Documents behavior specifications, tool contracts, and user\-facing interaction patterns rather than leaving critical behavior implicit in code.
- This role follows a hybrid model, requiring in\-office presence at least 1 day per week
U.S. COMPENSATION INFORMATION
Compensation for this role includes base salary, annual discretionary performance bonus, 401(k) plan with an annual employer contribution based on years of service and Bain’s best in class benefits package (details listed below).
Some local governments in the United States require a good\-faith, reasonable salary range be included in job postings for open roles. The estimated annualized compensation for this role is as follows:
In Atlanta, the good\-faith, reasonable annualized full\-time salary range for this role is between $79,250 \- $86,500
In Texas, the good\-faith, reasonable annualized full\-time salary range for this role is between $83,000 \- $90,750
In Chicago, the good\-faith, reasonable annualized full\-time salary range for this role is between $87,000 \- $95,250
Placement within these ranges will vary based on factors such as experience, education, training, and skill level.
Compensation also includes a discretionary annual performance bonus, 401(k) plan with employer contribution, and Bain’s best\-in\-class benefits—including full premium coverage for medical, dental, and vision, generous paid time off, and more.
Annual discretionary performance bonus
This role may also be eligible for other elements of discretionary compensation
4\.5% 401(k) company contribution, which increases after 3 years of service and is 100% vested upon start date
Bain \& Company's comprehensive benefits and wellness program is designed to help employees achieve personal independence, protection and stability in the areas most important to you and your family.
Bain pays 100% individual employee premiums for medical, dental and vision programs, offering one of the most comprehensive medical plans for employees without impacting your paycheck
Generous paid time off, including parental leave, sick leave and paid holidays
Fully vested 401(k) company contribution
Paid Life and Long\-Term Disability insurance
Annual fitness reimbursements
Salary Context
This $79K-$90K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1937 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At Bain & Company, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $181,170 based on 12,692 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000. This role's midpoint ($85K) sits 53% below the category median. Disclosed range: $79K to $90K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
Bain & Company AI Hiring
Bain & Company has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Atlanta, GA, US. Compensation range: $90K - $90K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (590 positions) offer remote work, while 3,217 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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