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About This Role
CompassX is a boutique business and technology consulting firm. We help Fortune 500 and high-growth clients deliver their most strategic initiatives, from enterprise transformations to digital and data-driven projects. With over 15 years of proven results, we’ve expanded across industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, consumer products, and quick service restaurants.
We are honored to be recognized as a three-time winner of Consulting Magazine’s Best Boutique Firms to Work For, and previously recognized as a “Best Place to Work” in Southern California and one of INC.’s 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.
We're looking for a GenAI Solution Architect who can do both: design the architecture of AI-powered systems and get hands-on building them. This isn't a slide-deck role or a pure advisory role. You'll be orchestrating and building agentic AI systems in real enterprise delivery environments - and helping clients understand what they've actually got.
At CompassX, we're delivering AI-enabled solutions for some of the most complex enterprise clients in financial services, pharma, and beyond. We need someone who has moved past the hype and is actively building with the tools - agents, orchestration frameworks, LLM integrations, and the data infrastructure that makes them work in production.
This role sits at the leading edge of our AI practice. You'll shape how we deliver GenAI engagements and help define what good looks like for our clients.
What You'll Do
- Architect GenAI Solutions: Design end-to-end architectures for AI-powered applications - from LLM selection and prompt engineering through orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and integration with enterprise data environments.
- Build and Orchestrate Agents: Go beyond design - build agentic AI workflows using frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar. You know how to orchestrate multi-agent systems and have shipped something real.
- Own the AI Stack: Work across the full GenAI delivery stack: LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock), vector databases, RAG pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment infrastructure.
- Bridge to Enterprise Systems: Integrate GenAI solutions with existing enterprise architecture - data platforms, APIs, identity and access controls, and compliance requirements. Make AI work within the constraints of real organizations.
- Advise Client Leadership: Translate technical architecture decisions into clear strategic narratives for client leadership. Help clients move from AI experimentation to AI-enabled operations.
- Accelerate the Team: Bring patterns, reusable components, and technical standards to the delivery team. Be the person who makes everyone else faster.
What You'll Bring
- Hands-On GenAI Experience: You have built production or near-production GenAI systems - not just demos. You've wrestled with evaluation, hallucination, latency, and cost at the architecture level.
- Agentic AI Fluency: Practical experience building agentic workflows and multi-agent systems using frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or similar. You understand where these tools shine and where they fall apart.
- LLM Platform Breadth: Hands-on experience with major LLM platforms and APIs: OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or equivalent. You know the trade-offs between them.
- Engineering Foundation: Strong Python skills and comfort in cloud-native environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP). You can write the code, not just spec it.
- Data Architecture Context: Understanding of how AI systems consume data - vector stores, embeddings, RAG architectures, and the data infrastructure that sits underneath production AI applications.
- Consulting & Communication: Experience working in client-facing or consulting delivery contexts. You can navigate organizational complexity and explain AI architecture to both technical teams and senior business stakeholders.
- Builder Mentality: You default to building. You use AI tools to accelerate your own work. You're excited to operate at the frontier of what's actually deployable in enterprise environments - not just what's theoretically possible.
Benefits
- Competitive salary with performance-based bonus
- PTO, holidays, and sabbatical program
- Health, dental, vision, and life insurance
- Retirement plan with company match from day one
- Learning and professional development support
- Small-firm culture with direct access to leadership
$150,000 - $190,000 a year This role is posted as a full-time position. We also welcome applications from independent contractors able to work on a 1099 or C2C basis.
Our consultants say CompassX is a place where they can truly find their own path. As part of a smaller firm, they see the impact of their work, have an identity, and know their voice matters. They value the freedom to take the reins of their careers, shape their client work, and maintain a direct line to leadership.
With CompassX’s focus on serving local Southern California clients, consultants not only build lasting relationships but also see the results of their work in the communities where they live.
At CompassX, you won’t just follow a path - you’ll create one. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
Salary Context
This $150K-$190K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At CompassX Group, 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. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($170K) sits 20% below the category median. Disclosed range: $150K to $190K.
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.
CompassX Group AI Hiring
CompassX Group has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Irvine, CA, US. Compensation range: $160K - $190K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (531 positions) offer remote work, while 8,478 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,078 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,646 roles, $261,000 median); Los Angeles (1,486 roles, $210,000 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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