Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at CENTRALIA SCHOOL DISTRICT?
Apply Now →About This Role
Paraeducator: Special Education ILC/IAC / Multilingual Advocate \- Temporary
Reports to: Principal Location: Centralia High School
Bargaining Unit: Part\-Time Teamsters FLSA Status: Non\-Exempt
Job Summary:
Paraeducators working in the special education classrooms assists the classroom teacher in supervision and instruction of special education students by following the goals of the student’s Individual Education Plan.
The Multilingual (ML) Student Advocate will support students who are learning English. They will meet with students, check grades, and problem solve with their teachers to help ensure their academic and social emotional success.
Required Qualifications:
- Associates’ Degree or 72 quarter college credits or have passed the ETS
- Ability to obtain a Criminal Justice fingerprint clearance
- Demonstrated ability to communicate effectively, possess awareness (for self and others), listen actively, be patient, incorporate humor/lightheartedness into work, be empathic, possess a growth mindset, and be customer\-service oriented
- Ability to support the District’s vision, mission, and goals including the belief that all students can succeed
- Demonstrated ability to maintain a positive attitude
- Ability to maintain timely and professional lines of communication with students, families, staff, and building administration
- Ability to create organizational systems and to flexibly respond to changing student needs, meet deadlines, and multi\-task when necessary
- Ability to function in a calm, efficient, courteous manner under stress and exercise careful judgment, confidentiality, and tact in the performance of duties
- Ability to maintain strict confidentiality, work effectively under pressure, and maintain professional relationships with students, co\-workers, and administration
- Right response trained or willing to be trained upon employment
- Ability to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodations
Preferred Qualifications:
- Ability to speak Spanish and English
- Positive experience working with adolescents
- Experience working in a K\-12 school setting
- Successful experience working with people from a variety of backgrounds
- Knowledge of and successful experience with social and human services; social service referral agencies; conflict resolution; record\-keeping; and crisis intervention
- Experience working with Multilingual learners
Essential Functions for this Position:
Special Education Paraeducator
- Communicates clearly, accurately, concisely, and professionally
- Adapts classroom work under the direction of the teacher for the purpose of providing a method to support and/or reinforce classroom objectives
- Assists teachers for the purpose of implementing lesson plans and/or developing daily living and behavioral skills
- Administers first aid, medical, and/or physical assistance (moving, lifting, eating, toileting, tube feeding, catheterizations, etc.)
- Monitors individual students, classroom and/or playground activities to maintain a safe and positive learning environment
- Maintains classroom equipment and students’ files/records as they pertain to special education
- Confers with teachers to provide input on schedule development, lesson planning, and student progress
- Restrains students using Right Response Training methods when appropriate
- Performs record keeping and basic clerical functions to support the teacher(s)
- Attends various meetings to support students
- Attends trainings as directed or appropriate
- Other duties as assigned
Multilingual Advocate Paraeducator
- Addresses specific needs of multilingual students including those with interrupted formal education or trauma
- Meets the needs of long\-term multilingual students including intensive college counseling and promotion of post\-high school learning.
- Meets with multilingual students to consult, check grades, and meet specific language needs
- Supports district efforts to substantially improve and sustain the academic achievement of all students
- Works collaboratively with teachers regarding best practices supporting students in their core classes
- Conducts regular visitations to multilingual and core classrooms and initiates conversations with content/core teachers about best practices for multilingual learners
- Plans and implements district and school family events for the purpose of strengthening relationships
- Supports families in helping their children to achieve and be successful in school
- Facilitates communication between school staff, students, parents, and community members by attending parent/teacher conferences, setting up meetings, making phone calls, translating documents, emailing, and other types of school and district communication
- Responds to inquiries and provides information via phone, email, and in person to families, staff, students, and community members
- Conducts home visits to assist in effectively communicating school\-based information, such as teacher concerns and student progress
- Attends daytime and evening school events to facilitate communication and establish open dialog between parties
- Responds to parent requests for school\-related information
- Assists teachers and administrators in recognizing and responding to the unique needs of all students as well as understanding cultural nuances that affect their learning
- Works toward developing positive public relations with the parents, school, and community
- Collaborates and coordinates with family resource advocates from other buildings and the Executive Director of Teaching \& Learning
Salary:
Special Education Paraeducator Hours \- $20\.23 \- $27\.01 hourly, Depending on experience and qualifications
Multilingual Advocate Paraeducator Hours \- $19\.73 \- $26\.51 hourly, Depending on experience and qualifications
$.50 per hour additional for employees with an Associate of Arts degree or higher
$.50 per hour additional for employees who fluently speak, write, and read Spanish
Work schedule: Seven (7\) hours per day (4 hours special education paraeducator/3 hours multilingual advocate) \- M\-F (7:15 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.), / For the 26\-27 school year (192 days including 11 holidays)
Benefits:
11 paid holidays; 11 sick leave days and 3 personal leave days; health benefits through the School Employees’ Benefits Board including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and long\-term disability insurance; and other fringe benefits as allowed under the Part\-Time Teamsters Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Application Procedures:
Anyone interested in this position should apply through www.edjobsnw.org AND submit a letter of interest to Scot Embrey, Principal at Centralia High School at [email protected]. Current employees of Centralia School District need only to send a letter of interest to Scot Embrey.
Salary Context
This $39K-$56K 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
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 CENTRALIA SCHOOL DISTRICT, 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 in Demand for This Role
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 ($47K) sits 78% below the category median. Disclosed range: $39K to $56K.
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.
CENTRALIA SCHOOL DISTRICT AI Hiring
CENTRALIA SCHOOL DISTRICT has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Centralia, WA, US. Compensation range: $56K - $56K.
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
Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence
Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.