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About This Role
The world of digital assets is accelerating in speed, magnitude, and complexity, opening the door to new ways for leveraging the blockchain. Fireblocks' platform and network provide the simplest and most secure way for companies to work with digital assets and it trusted by some of the largest financial institutions, banks, globally-recognized brands, and Web3 companies in the world, including BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, ANZ Bank, Revolut, and thousands more.
Fireblocks is seeking a visionary and experienced Senior Director of AI Transformation to lead our enterprise-wide AI strategy. Reporting directly to the CIO this high-impact leadership role will be instrumental in shaping and executing our AI strategy, and elevate business processes by designing innovative AI-driven solutions to increase productivity, reduce operational overhead, and unlock new value. The ideal candidate brings a strong background in business analysis, deep knowledge of emerging AI technologies, and a proven ability to translate strategy into scalable, secure, and measurable outcomes.
### What you'll do:
- Design future-state workflows using Generative and Agentic AI aligned with business goals, productivity outcomes and user needs.
- Lead cross-functional workshops to identify, prioritize, and shape high-impact AI use cases.
- Conduct deep business process analyses across departments (Sales, CustomerOps, Finance, IT, HR, etc.) to identify areas for automation, augmentation, or reimagination via AI.
- Prioritize high-ROI opportunities for AI integration, with a focus on reducing repetitive manual tasks and improving business delivery.
- Serve as the internal evangelist and subject matter expert for enterprise AI adoption
- Apply AI and LLMs to reduce costs, improve process efficiency, and modernize legacy operations.
- Build and lead a team of AI/ML engineers to develop scalable, production-ready solutions.
- Guide the effective use of LLMs for tasks such as automation, summarization, classification, and decision support.
- Secure stakeholder buy-in and drive commitment to AI-led change.
- Deliver measurable improvements in productivity, operational cost reduction, and process velocity.
- Partner with business and tech teams to define and execute implementation plans.
- Design and execute a company-wide change management strategy for AI adoption, including training, communication, and stakeholder alignment.
### What you'll bring:
- 9+ years of consistent achievement in driving business transformation, strategic advisory, and innovation.
- Practical experience leading AI, Generative AI, and Agentic AI initiatives aimed at modernizing functions like People, Customer Operations, Sales, Finance, Legal, and Marketing.
- Proven ability to lead multidisciplinary teams from ideation through to successful execution.
- Exceptional communication, facilitation, and narrative-building capabilities tailored for both technical and business-oriented audiences.
- Knowledgeable in applying design thinking techniques to foster innovation and solve complex challenges.
- Proven experience with organizational change management strategies and frameworks for measuring business impact.
For employees hired to work remotely from New York, or from our NYC HQ, Fireblocks is required by law to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation range for this role.This range is specific to New York City, and takes into consideration a wide range of factors that are reviewed when making a hiring decision, such as years of experience, skills, and other business needs. It is not typical for a candidate to be hired at or near the top of the pay range and each compensation decision is dependent on each individual case. A reasonable base salary range estimate for this position is $240,000 to $325,000. The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which for some roles may include a target bonus, a very competitive equity grant, and very generous benefits. While we believe competitive compensation is a critical aspect of you deciding to join us, we do hope you also spend time considering why our mission and culture are right for you. We are creating something transformational here, and we hope you are as excited about the future as we are.
*Fireblocks' mission is to enable every business to easily and securely access digital assets and cryptocurrencies. In order to do that, we strongly believe our workforce should be as diverse as our clients, and this is why we embrace diversity and inclusion in all its forms.*
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Salary Context
This $240K-$325K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $170K across 217 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 37,339 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Fireblocks, 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 $154,000 based on 8,743 positions with disclosed compensation. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,600. This role's midpoint ($282K) sits 83% above the category median. Disclosed range: $240K to $325K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $85,000; Mid: $147,000; Senior: $225,000; Director: $230,600; VP: $248,357.
Fireblocks AI Hiring
Fireblocks has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $325K - $325K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $204,100 across 1,633 tracked positions. That's 7% above the national 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 37,339 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 3,672 entry-level, 23,272 mid-level, 7,048 senior, and 3,347 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (2,732 positions). The remaining 34,484 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 21 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 24 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 264 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 37,339 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (33,926), AI Software Engineer (823), AI Product Manager (805). 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 (3,672) are outnumbered by mid-level (23,272) and senior (7,048) 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 3,347 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (2,732 positions), with 34,484 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 $190,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $300,688. 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 $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,600. 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: Rag (23,721 postings), Aws (12,486 postings), Rust (10,785 postings), Python (5,564 postings), Azure (3,616 postings), Gcp (3,032 postings), Prompt Engineering (2,112 postings), Kubernetes (1,713 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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