Technical Product Manager, Data Science

$115K - $130K Remote Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AnthropicOpenaiPythonRag

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

CENTRL is a leading risk and compliance technology company that provides AI powered enterprise-grade risk, due diligence, cyber security and privacy management solutions to financial institutions worldwide. Our clients include some of the largest banks and investment management firms across the Americas, Europe and APAC. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, CENTRL has regional offices in New York, India, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Established in 2015, CENTRL is a high-growth, venture backed SaaS firm leading the way in innovative generative AI solutions to manage third party risk and due diligence.

Position Overview:

We are looking for an owner for the accuracy, reliability, and cost-efficiency of the AI behind CentrlX, our agentic platform for Manager Research and Investor Relations teams at investment firms.

We have a strong engineering team building the platform: agents, skills, knowledge, automations, connectors, and governance. We are looking for a single owner for output accuracy and efficiency.

You will own the model and prompt layer end to end. You will build the evaluation datasets and harnesses that tell us whether a change actually helped, run structured comparisons across model providers on accuracy, latency, and cost, and drive the resulting changes into the product. You will help create and design agents and skills, and work closely with sales and PS in order to help drive standards for prompting and agents, and then feed that back into the product design. You will do a real share of this work yourself from prompt iteration to writing user facing stories like incorporating interactive feedback. While we have support teams to intake client issues and fix them, you will own AI Quality and be the point person for what is happening and what needs to improve.

This is a product role, not a research role. We want the analytical rigor of a data scientist paired with the judgment of a product manager: someone who can run the experiment, interpret it honestly, and then turn it into a shipped change.

Key Responsibilities

Evaluation & AI Quality

  • Build and own CentrlX's evaluation foundation from the ground up: golden datasets, grading rubrics, LLM-as-judge pipelines calibrated against human labels, and regression suites that run before prompt or model changes ship.
  • Define what "good" means for each core workflow — document digitization and extraction, retrieval and groundedness, Smart Summary, Smart Response, Smart Evaluation, and full multi-step agent runs — and set a measurable quality bar for each.
  • Evaluate agent behavior, not just single responses: tool selection, retrieval quality, step sequencing, and whether the finished deliverable holds up to a practitioner's review.
  • Turn every real client failure into a permanent eval case, so the same class of error does not come back.

Model Selection & Cost Optimization

  • Continuously benchmark models across providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open-weight, and specialized document models — on accuracy, latency, and cost for each workflow, and make the call on what we run where.
  • Own model migrations end to end, including our in-flight move off GPT-4.1 in document digitization, where current alternatives are materially faster, cheaper, and more accurate.
  • Track and manage AI spend by workflow, and use routing, model tiering, caching, and context strategy to hold quality while bringing cost down.
  • Maintain a working view of the model landscape — releases, pricing changes, deprecations — and turn it into a recommendation with evidence attached, not a newsletter.

Instrumentation & Data

  • Define the logging and tracing we need — prompt inputs, retrieved context, prompt text, outputs, tool calls, token counts, latency — and write the stories to get it built.
  • Partner with Product and Design to build in-app feedback capture (ratings, corrections, structured reason codes) so labeled data accumulates as a byproduct of normal use instead of a periodic collection project.
  • Build and maintain the datasets yourself: pull the data, label it, curate the hard slices, and keep the sets honest with holdouts and rotation.

Ownership & Cross-Functional Partnership

  • Serve as the single point of contact for AI quality escalations from Client Success, Sales Engineering, and Professional Services — triage, reproduce, root-cause, and close the loop.
  • Write the user stories and acceptance criteria that turn findings into shipped changes, and make the prompt, configuration, and model changes yourself where that is the fastest path.
  • Publish a regular quality and cost readout that leadership, engineering, and client-facing teams all treat as the same version of the truth.
  • Work with CENTRL's Manager Research, Investor Relations, and diligence practitioners to encode domain judgment into rubrics — in our market, accuracy is defined by industry expertise, not by a generic benchmark.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Must have work authorization in the USA.
  • 3+ years across product management, data science, or applied AI, including at least 2 years working on LLM-based products in production.
  • Hands-on Python and SQL. You are comfortable in a notebook pulling data, running batch inference, and computing metrics. This role writes code; it does not only specify it.
  • Demonstrated experience building evaluation datasets and harnesses for LLM systems: golden sets, rubric design, LLM-as-judge with human calibration, and regression testing against prompt and model changes.
  • Working fluency with at least one eval or LLM observability platform: Braintrust, LangSmith, Langfuse, Arize Phoenix, W&B Weave, Inspect, Promptfoo, or a comparable in-house harness.
  • Practical understanding of RAG systems: retrieval quality, groundedness and faithfulness, hallucination detection, and chunking and context strategy.
  • Statistical literacy: you can size a comparison, judge significance, and say plainly when a difference is not real.
  • Ability to write clear user stories and acceptance criteria and work inside an agile engineering process.
  • Strong written communication. This role produces recommendations that executives act on.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with document AI: OCR and vision-language extraction, table and layout parsing, and structured output from complex PDFs.
  • Experience evaluating agentic systems — multi-step trajectories, tool-use correctness, and long-run failure modes.
  • Experience in financial services or investment management: due diligence, manager research, investor relations, or DDQ/RFP workflows.
  • Experience reducing inference cost at scale through routing, tiering, batching, caching, or context compression.
  • Experience designing in-product feedback mechanisms that generate labeled evaluation data.
  • Familiarity with agent frameworks and MCP.
  • Degree in a quantitative or technical field.

Salary Context

This $115K-$130K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 1356 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company Centrl
Title Technical Product Manager, Data Science
Location Remote, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary $115K - $130K
Remote Yes

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 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 75% of the market. At Centrl, 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

Anthropic (2% of roles) Openai (3% of roles) Python (16% of roles) Rag (6% 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 $212,000 based on 11,866 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($122K) sits 42% below the category median. Disclosed range: $115K to $130K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.

Centrl AI Hiring

Centrl has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Remote, US. Compensation range: $130K - $130K.

Remote Work Context

Remote AI roles pay a median of $185,906 across 2,124 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.

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 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 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 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). 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 (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) 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 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 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 $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. 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 $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 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 11,866 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $212,000. 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 6% of the 8,943 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.
Centrl 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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