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About This Role
Ciklum is looking for a Senior Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Engineer to join our team full-time in the US.
We are a custom product engineering company that supports both multinational organizations and scaling startups to solve their most complex business challenges. With a global team of over 4,000 highly skilled developers, consultants, analysts and product owners, we engineer technology that redefines industries and shapes the way people live.
About the role:
We are placing senior AI engineers to design and deliver production agentic AI systems for an enterprise client. You will build autonomous agents on the client’s existing enterprise AI stack. Glean is the agent platform and OpenAI / GPT Enterprise provides the reasoning layer, deployed on AWS or GCP. This is hands-on build work. You own agents from design through production, monitoring, and iteration.
You approach agents as production software. You work in terms of triggers, retrieval, reasoning steps, actions, permissions, evaluation, and observability, and you know how to make an agent reliable, secure, and maintainable at enterprise scale.
Responsibilities:
- We are placing senior AI engineers to design and deliver production agentic AI systems for an enterprise client. You will build autonomous agents on the client’s existing enterprise AI stack. Glean is the agent platform and OpenAI / GPT Enterprise provides the reasoning layer, deployed on AWS or GCP.
- This is hands-on build work. You own agents from design through production, monitoring, and iteration.
- You approach agents as production software. You work in terms of triggers, retrieval, reasoning steps, actions, permissions, evaluation, and observability, and you know how to make an agent reliable, secure, and maintainable at enterprise scale.
Requirements:
Agentic AI and LLM
- 3+ years building with LLMs in production systems that real users depend on.
- Hands-on experience designing agentic workflows: tool and function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multi-step orchestration, and memory.
- OpenAI / GPT Enterprise. Deep practical experience with the OpenAI API and GPT Enterprise: model selection, prompt engineering, structured outputs, function calling, cost and latency tuning, and data-handling controls.
- Strong prompt-engineering discipline and an evaluation-first approach. You measure agent quality with evals rather than by inspection.
- Glean is required. Direct, hands-on production experience with the Glean platform: Agent Builder, Apps, Actions, Model Hub, connectors, and permission-aware retrieval. This is a non-negotiable requirement for the role.
- Working knowledge of enterprise search and RAG architecture on Glean: indexing, connectors, retrieval quality, and runtime permission enforcement.
What’s in it for you?
- Strong community: Work alongside top professionals in a friendly, open-door environment
- Growth focus: Take on large-scale projects with a global impact and expand your expertise
- Tailored learning: Boost your skills with internal events (meetups, conferences, workshops), Udemy access, language courses, and company-paid certifications
- Endless opportunities: Explore diverse domains through internal mobility, finding the best fit to gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge technologies
- Care: Healthcare, Basic Life Insurance, Short and Long-term disability insurance according to the Company’s Benefit Plans
About us:
At Ciklum, we are always exploring innovations, empowering each other to achieve more, and engineering solutions that matter. With us, you’ll work with cutting-edge technologies, contribute to impactful projects, and be part of a One Team culture that values collaboration and progress. In the US, Ciklum is growing fast—inviting experienced professionals to lead digital transformation alongside Fortune 500 clients. Be part of a company where innovation and impact go hand in hand.
Explore, empower, engineer with Ciklum!
Interested already? We would love to get to know you! Submit your application. We can’t wait to see you at Ciklum.
#LI-AV3
Required Skills
- Intelligent Automation
Job Info
- Job Identification 4849
- Job Category Data Science and Machine Learning
- Posting Date 10/07/2026, 02:55 AM
- Locations US-Remote (Remote)
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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Ciklum, 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 $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Ciklum AI Hiring
Ciklum has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in US.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $209,100 across 306 tracked positions.
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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 $256,000 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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