Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Downs Septic & Drain?
Apply Now →Skills & Technologies
About This Role
About BigReputation.ai
helps home service companies generate more reviews, improve local rankings, and win more business through AI\-powered reputation management.
We work with contractors across:
- Plumbing
- HVAC
- Electrical
- Roofing
- Garage doors
- Home services
We are founder\-led, fast\-moving, AI\-heavy, and focused on execution over meetings.
We recently crossed $20k MRR and are looking for a hands\-on growth operator to help scale customer acquisition aggressively.
This is not a corporate marketing role.
We want someone who likes:
- Shipping quickly
- Running experiments
- Building systems
- Testing channels
- Owning results
- Working directly with the founder
What You’ll Own
You will own growth execution across multiple acquisition channels.
Current channels include:
- Meta ads
- Influencer partnerships
- Webinar funnels
- Cold outbound
- Email marketing
- Retargeting
- Affiliate/referral programs
You will help us:
- Scale paid acquisition
- Increase demo volume
- Improve CAC efficiency
- Build repeatable growth systems
- Expand influencer partnerships
- Improve funnel conversion
- Launch and test new acquisition channels
Responsibilities
- Launch and manage Meta ad campaigns
- Build and optimize landing pages
- Coordinate influencer and affiliate partnerships
- Run webinar funnels and follow\-up sequences
- Manage outbound growth systems
- Analyze CAC, conversion rates, and funnel metrics
- Create and test ad creative
- Write high\-converting copy
- Improve onboarding and activation flows
- Implement marketing automations using AI tools
- Run growth experiments weekly
- Work directly with the founder on growth strategy and execution
What We’re Looking For
You may be a fit if you:
- Have worked at an SMB SaaS company
- Have personally managed paid ad campaigns
- Understand B2B lead generation
- Know how to move quickly without lots of structure
- Are technical enough to work with modern AI tools
- Have experience with outbound, funnels, or webinars
- Can execute without waiting for perfect direction
- Care about metrics and business outcomes
Bonus points if you:
- Understand home services
- Have worked with contractors
- Have agency experience
- Have scaled influencer or affiliate programs
- Have startup or entrepreneurial experience
Tools We Use
Examples include:
- Meta Ads
- HubSpot / CRM systems
- Clay
- Apollo
- AI tools and automations
- Webinar software
- Email infrastructure
- Landing page builders
You do not need experience with every tool.
What This Role Is NOT
This is NOT:
- A corporate “Head of Marketing” role
- A people\-management role
- A slow\-moving enterprise environment
- A pure brand/content role
This IS:
- Tactical
- Experimental
- Fast\-paced
- High ownership
- Execution\-heavy
Compensation
- Competitive base salary
- Performance incentives tied to growth
- Potential equity/upside for the right person
Location
Remote is fine.
US\-based preferred.
To Apply
Send:
- A short intro
- What growth channels have you personally owned
- Examples of campaigns or funnels you’ve run
- Metrics/results you helped drive
- Why this role interests you
We care more about execution and results than polished resumes.
Pay: $90,000\.00 \- $140,000\.00 per year
Work Location: Remote
Salary Context
This $90K-$140K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1937 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 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At Downs Septic & Drain, 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 $181,170 based on 12,692 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000. This role's midpoint ($115K) sits 37% below the category median. Disclosed range: $90K to $140K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
Downs Septic & Drain AI Hiring
Downs Septic & Drain has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Remote, US. Compensation range: $140K - $140K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $170,000 across 1,926 positions. About 15% of all AI roles offer remote work.
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 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 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 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). 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 (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) 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 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 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 $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 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 (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 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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