AI Quality Engineer

$100K - $122K Vienna, VA, US Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AzureLangchainOpenaiRag

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Overview:

BRMi is seeking a AI Quality Engineer to ensure AI\-powered applications and automation solutions are accurate, secure, reliable, and ready for production deployment.

This is not a traditional QA role. The AI Quality Engineer will establish quality standards, validate AI solutions, develop testing frameworks, and certify AI applications before release. The role works closely with AI Engineers, Platform Engineers, Architects, Security, and Product teams to ensure enterprise AI solutions meet quality, governance, and operational requirements.

Benefits:

  • Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
  • Employer\-Paid Life Insurance
  • Employer\-Paid Short\-Term and Long\-Term Disability Insurance
  • 401(k)
  • Paid Time Off (PTO) that includes Vacation Leave, Sick Leave, and 11 Paid Holidays
  • Educational Assistance

Salary: 100k\-122k

\*\*Hybrid in Vienna, VA\*\* \*\*An In Person interview will be required for this role\*\*

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Responsibilities:

  • Define and maintain AI quality, testing, and production readiness standards.
  • Validate AI\-powered applications, AI agents, and Retrieval\-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions.
  • Develop test plans, validation datasets, regression testing, and benchmarking strategies.
  • Evaluate AI accuracy, reliability, security, performance, and compliance.
  • Review AI workflows, prompt execution, retrieval pipelines, and automation processes.
  • Perform production readiness assessments and support release approvals.
  • Analyze AI metrics, logs, and telemetry to identify quality improvements.
  • Partner with engineering teams to resolve quality, security, and performance issues.
  • Create documentation, quality scorecards, and certification reports.
  • Support quality reviews for Internal Developer Portal (IDP) and Developer Experience (DevEx) platform capabilities.
  • Perform other duties as assigned

Qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
  • 5\+ years of experience in Software Quality Engineering, Test Engineering, Software Development, Platform Engineering, AI Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
  • 2\+ years of experience with Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI agents, or RAG solutions.
  • Experience developing automated testing strategies, validation frameworks, and regression testing.
  • Experience with Azure AI, Azure OpenAI, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, or similar AI platforms.
  • Experience with Azure cloud services and cloud\-native applications.
  • Understanding of DevSecOps, CI/CD, APIs, microservices, and enterprise software development practices.
  • Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.

Desired* Experience with enterprise AI platforms and multi\-agent systems.

  • Experience with Platform Engineering, DevOps, Developer Experience (DevEx), or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).
  • Experience implementing AI governance, Responsible AI, or AI compliance frameworks.
  • Experience with AI observability and monitoring tools.
  • Experience supporting regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, or government.
  • Relevant certifications in Azure, AI, cloud, or software quality are a plus.

\*\* BRMi will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.\*\*\*\*This is a W2 opportunity only\*\* EOE/Minorities/Females/Vet/Disabled

We are an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and commitment at all levels. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. Employment policies and decisions on employment and promotion are based on merit, qualifications, performance, and business needs. The decisions and criteria governing the employment relationship with all employees are made in a nondiscriminatory manner, without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, age, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, veteran status, or any other factor determined to be unlawful by federal, state, or local statutes.

Salary Context

This $100K-$122K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company BRMi
Title AI Quality Engineer
Location Vienna, VA, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary $100K - $122K
Remote No

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 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At BRMi, 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

Azure (22% of roles) Langchain (9% of roles) Openai (10% of roles) Rag (21% of roles)

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 $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400. This role's midpoint ($111K) sits 48% below the category median. Disclosed range: $100K to $122K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.

BRMi AI Hiring

BRMi has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Vienna, VA, US. Compensation range: $122K - $122K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 15% (635 positions) offer remote work, while 3,657 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,650 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (1,335 roles, $265,000 median); Los Angeles (708 roles, $214,112 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 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 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 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). 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 (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) 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 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 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 $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. 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 Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. 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 (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 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

Based on 6,420 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $214,900. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
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.
About 15% of the 4,317 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
BRMi is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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