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About This Role
Role Overview: As an Applied AI Platform Engineer III , you will actively engage in your engineering craft, taking a hands-on approach to building the platforms, tooling, accelerators, and frameworks that other engineering teams build on. Your expertise will be pivotal in delivering platform capabilities that delight the engineers who depend on them, while driving tangible leverage and value across Deloitte's AI engineering investments. You will leverage your extensive engineering craftsmanship across platform engineering, distributed systems, and modern AI/ML and Data infrastructure, consistently demonstrating your strong track record in delivering high-quality, reusable, outcome-focused solutions. The ideal candidate will be a dependable team player, collaborating with cross-functional teams to design, build, and operate the enabling layer for AI engineering at scale.
Key Responsibilities:
- Outcome-Driven Accountability: Embrace and drive a culture of accountability for engineering-leverage and adoption outcomes. Build platform capabilities that solve recurring problems once, well, for many teams-reducing per-team build and operate toil while ensuring consistency and compliance by default through high-quality, lean designs and implementations.
- Technical Leadership and Advocacy: Serve as the technical advocate for the platform as a product, ensuring capability integrity, feasibility, and alignment with the needs of the engineering teams who consume it. Lead requirement discovery with consuming teams, component design of platform services, frameworks, and the AI control plane, and their development, testing, integration, and support.
- Engineering Craftsmanship: Maintain accountability for the integrity of the platform architecture and for the enterprise tech-stack conformance baseline that engineering teams build against. Manage platform dependencies, code design, implementation, the data and policy-as-code enforcement layers, and the OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation substrate-building capabilities that are operable, instrumented, performant, and drift-resistant by design, to the production standards set by SRE. Stay hands-on, self-driven, and continuously learn new approaches, languages, and frameworks. Create technical specifications, codify recurring patterns into reusable components and golden paths, and write high-quality, supportable, scalable code to ensure all platform KPIs (adoption, reliability-by-design, and developer experience) are met or exceeded. Demonstrate collaborative skills to work effectively with diverse teams.
- Customer-Centric Engineering: Develop lean platform capabilities through rapid, inexpensive experimentation to solve the real needs of consuming engineering teams. Engage with those teams before, during, and after delivery to ensure the right capability is delivered at the right time-and adopted, not shelved.
- Incremental and Iterative Delivery: Adopt a mindset that favors action and evidence over extensive planning. Utilize a leaning-forward approach to navigate complexity and uncertainty, delivering platform capabilities as lean, adoption-validated increments rather than big-bang builds, and keeping them supportable and maintainable.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration and Integration: Work collaboratively with empowered, cross-functional partners: engineering, SRE, security and risk, data governance, and engineering leadership and architecture. Integrate their constraints into the paved roads so that the secure, compliant, and reliable path is the easy path. Deliver capabilities that are admissible-by-design and submit them for admission, co-defining service-level objectives with SRE, who set production standards and own the admission decision. Foster a collaborative environment that enhances team synergy and innovation.
- Advanced Technical Proficiency: Possess expertise in platform engineering and modern AI/ML infrastructure-internal developer platforms, MLOps/LLMOps, model serving, retrieval and vector infrastructure, eval and observability tooling, policy-as-code, container orchestration, IaC, and CI/CD at platform scale-including AI and Agentic SSDLC to deliver self-service, governed capabilities with full automation from discovery to production to operations and all quality checks through the SSDLC lifecycle. Strive to be a role model, leveraging these techniques to optimize platform solutioning and delivery. Demonstrate strong understanding of the full lifecycle of platform and product development, focusing on continuous improvement and learning.
- Domain Expertise: Quickly acquire domain knowledge of the enterprise data estate and the AI use-case patterns the platform must serve. Translate the needs of engineering teams, reference architectures, and governance requirements into reusable frameworks, the data platform, and governance-as-code enforcement. Be a valuable, flexible, and dedicated team member, supportive of teammates, and focused on quality and tech debt payoff.
- Effective Communication and Influence: Exhibit exceptional communication skills, capable of articulating complex technical concepts clearly and compellingly. Inspire and influence teammates and product teams through well-structured arguments and trade-offs supported by evidence. Create coherent narratives that align technical solutions with business objectives.
- Engagement and Collaborative Co-Creation: Engage and collaborate with product engineering teams at all organizational levels, including customers as needed. Build and maintain constructive relationships, fostering a culture of co-creation and shared momentum towards achieving product goals. Align diverse perspectives and drive consensus to create feasible solutions.
The team: US Deloitte Technology Product Engineering has modernized software and product delivery, creating a scalable, cost-effective model that focuses on value/outcomes that leverages a progressive and responsive talent structure. As Deloitte's primary internal development team, Product Engineering delivers innovative digital solutions to businesses, service lines, and internal operations with proven bottom-line results and outcomes. It helps power Deloitte's success. It is the engine that drives Deloitte, serving many of the world's largest, most respected companies. We develop and deploy cutting-edge internal and go-to-market solutions that help Deloitte operate effectively and lead in the market. Our reputation is built on a tradition of delivering with excellence.
The successful candidate will possess:
- Excellent interpersonal and organizational skills, with the ability to handle diverse situations, complex projects, and changing priorities, behaving with passion, empathy, and care.
Required Qualifications:
- A bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, machine learning, or related discipline. Experience is the most relevant factor.
- 5+ years of software and platform engineering experience with most of the following: Angular, React, NodeJS, Python(Mandatory), C#, .NET, Java, Rust, SQL/NoSQL, PyTorch, TensorFlow, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, LangFuse, Terraform, as well as unit, integration, and end-to-end testing frameworks & tools, specifically BDD, Gherkin, Cucumber, Playwright, and Selenium.
- 3+ years of experience designing, building, and operating AI/ML platform or infrastructure, with hands-on experience across building tooling for MLOps/LLMOps, model serving, retrieval and vector infrastructure, and eval/observability instrumentation for LLM integration (OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models).
- 3+ years of experience with cloud-native engineering on any of the cloud hyperscalers such as Azure, AWS, or GCP-including their AI/ML services such as Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, or Vertex AI-as well as container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), Big Data, Databricks, CI/CD at platform scale, and distributed systems.
- Prior experience with AI control-plane and agent-runtime patterns: model/LLM gateway, A2A and MCP integration, agent runtimes (e.g., Google ADK, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore), guardrails (PII redaction, prompt-injection, content, tool permissioning/tool-RBAC), policy-as-code, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Prior experience with enterprise data platform engineering: data pipelines, self-service and data-product enablement, governance-as-code enforcement, and metadata/lineage.
- Prior software engineering experience with the understanding of Business Context Diagrams (BCD), sequence/activity/state/entity relationship/data flow diagrams, OOP/OOD, data structures, algorithms, and code instrumentations, and AI-augmented spec-driven development.
- Prior experience using methodologies & tools such as XP, Lean, DevSecOps, SRE, ADO, GitHub, SonarQube, and ArgoCD to deliver high-quality platforms and products rapidly
- Ability to travel 10%, on average, based on the work you do and products you build.
- Limited immigration sponsorship may be available.
The wage range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for the applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled. At Deloitte, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is $102,500 - $210,600.
You may also be eligible to participate in a discretionary annual incentive program, subject to the rules governing the program, whereby an award, if any, depends on various factors, including, without limitation, individual and organizational performance.
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Salary Context
This $102K-$210K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 2094 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 10,827 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 77% of the market. At Deloitte, 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 $212,160 based on 13,809 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($156K) sits 26% below the category median. Disclosed range: $102K to $210K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,111. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($266,050) and AI Engineering Manager ($253,461). By seniority level: Entry: $112,320; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,300; VP: $236,450.
Deloitte AI Hiring
Deloitte has 122 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Engineer, AI Safety, AI Product Manager. Positions span Morristown, NJ, Tulsa, OK, Grand Rapids, MI. Compensation range: $112K - $338K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (665 positions) offer remote work, while 10,097 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (3,262 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,767 roles, $260,600 median); Los Angeles (1,585 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 10,827 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 122 entry-level, 5,256 mid-level, 3,922 senior, and 1,527 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (665 positions). The remaining 10,097 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,480. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,111. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($266,050 median, 70 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($253,461 median, 58 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 476 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 10,827 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (8,288), AI Software Engineer (548), AI Product Manager (471). 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 (122) are outnumbered by mid-level (5,256) and senior (3,922) 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 1,527 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (665 positions), with 10,097 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 $213,480. Top-quartile roles start at $264,111, 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 $266,050 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. 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 (2,093 postings), Aws (1,100 postings), Azure (910 postings), Rag (863 postings), Gcp (680 postings), Pytorch (549 postings), Claude (532 postings), Kubernetes (511 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.
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