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About This Role
Business Area: Corp. Strategy
Seniority Level: Director
Job Description: At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.
As the Director of AI Industry Solutions, you will play a pivotal role in supporting global Sales, R&D, and Customer Retention in the Financial Services industry. Your focus will be on leveraging AI, data analytics, and innovative R&D to track market trends, shape business strategies, and turn insights into actionable plans. You'll guide Cloudera's teams through the AI-driven transformation, providing them with the knowledge, tools, and R&D advancements needed to engage effectively with key accounts.
In this role, you will create and manage AI-focused content, support internal enablement, pipeline development, and help acquire new clients through industry-specific use cases. You'll work closely with R&D teams to ensure the latest AI innovations are integrated into solutions, enhancing market differentiation. Additionally, you will lead internal industry communities and represent Cloudera as a subject matter expert at external events, driving thought leadership on AI and advanced analytics in the Financial Services sector.
This role is not eligible for immigration sponsorship. As the Director, Global AI Industry Solutions, you will:
- The Strategic Bridge: Translate complex Product R&D advancements into high-value business outcomes, sales playbooks, and go-to-market strategies tailored specifically for the Financial Services sector.
- Executive & Technical Evangelism: Act as a trusted advisor to key customer accounts. Deliver compelling presentations to C-level executives (CEOs, CDOs, CIOs) while maintaining deep technical credibility with data science and engineering teams.
- Cross-Functional Influence: Collaborate closely with Sales, Product Management, Engineering, and Marketing to ensure Cloudera’s AI solutions align with evolving market dynamics and customer pain points.
- Deal Support & Value Engineering: Provide deep industry-specific AI expertise during high-value sales cycles, helping technical teams validate architecture while helping business buyers calculate ROI.
- Thought Leadership: Represent Cloudera as an industry expert at global conferences, panels, and through written collateral, driving market share through insightful, research-backed commentary on AI in finance.
- Technical Prototyping & Architecture: Act as a hands-on builder. Design, develop, and deliver cutting-edge AI reference architectures, technical prototypes, and MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) that address specific Financial Services use cases (e.g., fraud detection, risk modeling, generative AI compliance, etc.).
What We're Looking For:
- The Builder Mindset: Proven ability to build technical prototypes and design production-grade reference architectures.
- Technical Proficiency: Deep, hands-on familiarity with enterprise AI/ML engineering lifecycles, data orchestration, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and modern AI frameworks (e.g., LLMs, RAG architecture, vector databases).
- Industry Experience: 10+ years within the Financial Services ecosystem, with a track record of implementing AI, machine learning, or advanced data analytics solutions in a production environment.
- Executive Presence: Exceptional communication skills with the rare ability to pivot seamlessly from technical whiteboarding to high-level business strategy presentations.
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a highly technical discipline. An advanced technical degree (Master's or Ph.D.) or an MBA is a strong plus.
The expected base salary range for this role in:
- New York is $200-225k
- Please note that the compensation details listed in our job postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include commissions or bonus as applicable.
- The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location
What you can expect from us:
- Generous PTO Policy
- Support work life balance with Unplugged Days
- Flexible WFH Policy
- Mental & Physical Wellness programs
- Phone and Internet Reimbursement program
- Access to Continued Career Development
- Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages
- Paid Volunteer Time
- Employee Resource Groups
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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 Cloudera, 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. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $272,300.
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.
Cloudera AI Hiring
Cloudera has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, New York, NY.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $221,000 across 3,078 tracked positions. That's 4% above the national 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 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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