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About This Role
Overview:
At eimagine, we know that your best work happens when you live your best life and share your unique talents, so we do everything we can to be intentional in a remote enabled environment to make that possible. Recognized as a Best Places to Work since 2015, we are a team of humbly confident people who are proud of their craft, continuous learners, and have been known to cheer loudly for our teammates. For over 25 years we have been helping clients navigate technology and business change, while staying committed to delivering value & outcomes that enables their success.
eimagine is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to design, build, and deploy AI applications that help clients improve business processes, access trusted information, and make better decisions. This hands-on role turns enterprise data and approved knowledge into reliable applications, automated workflows, and decision-support tools. The role emphasizes AI application engineering and bringing analytical models into production. Working with architects, data engineers, analytics specialists, product owners, and business subject matter experts, this person will take solutions from discovery and experimentation through deployment, monitoring, and knowledge transfer. Join us as we #eimaginebetter.
Description of Duties:* Build AI application services, APIs, and integrations that connect approved models, enterprise data, and business workflows. Implement reusable tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) services within established architecture and security standards.
- Develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), search, and guided-assistance capabilities using approved content, source references, permission-aware retrieval, and appropriate human escalation.
- Build and maintain content ingestion and retrieval pipelines, including document parsing, chunking, metadata enrichment, embedding, and indexing. Keep source content current and access permissions accurate throughout the pipeline.
- Collaborate with data engineering and analytics teams to assess data readiness and prepare reproducible datasets and features for AI and predictive applications.
- Partner with analytics specialists to evaluate predictive models for business use cases. Implement reproducible scoring, integrate model outputs into applications, and monitor performance. Contribute to additional machine learning approaches where appropriate to the use case and available expertise.
- Translate model outputs into understandable explanations, prioritized work queues, and scenario tools. Work with business stakeholders to connect recommendations to practical actions and measure results.
- Implement automated tests and evaluations for answer quality, model performance, access controls, and failure cases. Version code, prompts, datasets, and models; monitor quality, reliability, latency, and operating cost.
- Apply approved privacy, security, and responsible AI requirements, including least-privilege access, auditability, subgroup performance review, and human review of consequential recommendations.
- Implement safeguards for AI applications, including defenses against prompt injection, input and output validation, content filtering, secure tool and API invocation, and protection of sensitive data in prompts, logs, and responses.
- Document assumptions, limitations, operating procedures, and technical decisions. Support knowledge transfer so client and internal teams can maintain and extend solutions over time.
- Deliver tested, maintainable AI services; reproducible analyses and model evaluations; documented data and model limitations; integrations that fit business workflows; and practical operating guidance. Establish release criteria with the team and demonstrate business value before scaling a capability.
Desired Skills & Experience:
- Demonstrated experience delivering production software and AI or machine learning capabilities, including responsibility for deployment, troubleshooting, and ongoing improvement.
- Strong Python and SQL skills, API development experience, and sound software engineering practices including Git, automated testing, code review, and deployment pipelines.
- Hands-on experience building LLM applications using retrieval, tool calling, structured outputs, and systematic evaluation. Ability to identify when a simpler search, workflow, or rules-based solution is appropriate.
- Working knowledge of security risks specific to LLM applications, including prompt injection, data leakage, and unsafe tool use, with practical experience implementing controls to mitigate them.
- Working knowledge of predictive modeling and machine learning, with practical experience integrating model outputs into software or operational workflows. Ability to collaborate with an experienced modeler on evaluation and production readiness.
- Understanding of model validation, data leakage, missing data, class imbalance, and uncertainty. Ability to implement reliable scoring using the same feature definitions and transformations used during model development.
- Ability to select evaluation measures that reflect operational needs, including precision and recall, probability calibration, and performance across relevant user groups or business segments. Understand the distinction between prediction and evidence that an action causes improvement.
- Experience deploying cloud-based services and working with authentication, authorization, secrets, logging, and monitoring. Ability to work within an Azure-based environment.
- Clear communication with technical and business stakeholders; comfort working through evolving requirements and identifying when specialist support is needed.
- Experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, FastAPI, Azure Web Apps or Container Apps, and Microsoft Entra ID, or closely comparable technologies.
- Experience consuming governed Snowflake datasets; MCP services; knowledge graphs or semantic layers; and React / TypeScript application integration.
- Experience delivering enterprise solutions involving sensitive data, complex business workflows, or human decision support.
- Hands-on development of supervised machine learning models on structured data; model lifecycle operations, explainability, experimental design, causal inference, or constrained optimization.
Education:
- Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science or equivalent job-related experience required.
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 eimagine, 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. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300.
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.
eimagine AI Hiring
eimagine has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Indianapolis, IN, US.
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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