Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at CONFIDO?
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About This Role
Confido is the AI infrastructure powering modern CPG — the platform that 200\+ brands like OLIPOP, Simple Mills, Dr. Squatch, and Tropicana use to run everything from deductions to production planning. Finance, accounting, sales, and operations, unified in one system for the first time.
We're growing 5x year over year with a small team in New York City; the people who join now will shape the product, the culture, and the company itself.
If you want your work on shelves everywhere — and outsized ownership while you build — we'd love to meet you.
The Role
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Build the core AI behind Confido — and get your hands on an unusually rich, messy dataset: hundreds of thousands of documents across dozens of sources and hundreds of layouts and contexts, much of it beyond what any system reads well today.
As a Senior Applied AI / ML Engineer, you'll own AI problems end to end — research, prototyping, production, and the evaluation that keeps probabilistic systems reliable — across document understanding, forecasting, and agentic workflows.
Location: New York, NY (Relocation supported)
What you'll do
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- Build LLM systems that turn complex, inconsistent financial documents into clean, typed, validated data — the backbone the rest of the platform runs on
- Design agentic workflows that retrieve and reason over fragmented enterprise systems, with the eval harnesses and guardrails to run them in production
- Build and improve demand forecasting across thousands of intermittent series — classical time\-series and gradient\-boosted models, with rolling\-origin backtesting and best\-fit selection
- Wrangle messy, real\-world data: baselining, outlier and anomaly detection, entity reconciliation, and ingestion across heterogeneous sources
- Own how we measure success — eval datasets, benchmarks, and monitoring for systems with no single "correct" answer
What we're looking for
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Required
- 3\+ years of applied AI / ML, with systems you've taken to production (not just prototypes)
- Depth in at least one, and working fluency across several, of: time\-series / forecasting and statistical modeling; LLM and agentic systems; large\-scale messy\-data engineering
- You build evaluation and monitoring as a matter of course — and know which metric to trust, and how to avoid leakage and train/serve skew
- Strong product sense: you turn AI capability into real outcomes, and know when a simpler approach wins
- Masters degree in STEM
Nice to have
- Demand forecasting / time\-series (Prophet, ARIMA\-family, gradient\-boosted)
- Agentic workflows, RAG, or retrieval systems in production
- Document understanding / information extraction from unstructured sources
- Startup experience or comfort in fast\-moving environments
Perks \+ Benefits
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- Equity — own a meaningful piece of the company you’re helping build
- Fully paid health coverage through Aetna — we cover 100% of employee premiums
- Top\-tier dental and vision coverage through Guardian
- Carrot Fertility Pro — comprehensive fertility and family\-forming support
- 12 weeks of paid parental leave
- Unlimited PTO — plus regular 4\-day holiday weekends we actually take
- 401(k) through Vestwell
- Paid relocation support — we’ll help you make the move to NYC
- Fully equipped workspace from day one — laptop, monitor, keyboard, and a $200 stipend to personalize your setup
- Team perks — catered Friday lunches, team dinners, and unlimited coffee \+ snacks featuring products from the brands we work with
*Confido provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.*
Compensation Range: $200K \- $250K
Salary Context
This $200K-$250K range is above the 75th percentile 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 CONFIDO, 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 $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 ($225K) sits 5% above the category median. Disclosed range: $200K to $250K.
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.
CONFIDO AI Hiring
CONFIDO has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $250K - $250K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $220,000 across 1,650 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 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
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