Distinguished Engineer - Applied AI

$150K - $300K Bethesda, MD, US Senior AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AnthropicHugging FaceLangchainLlamaLlamaindexOpenaiPrompt EngineeringPythonRag

About This Role

At GEICO, we offer a rewarding career where your ambitions are met with endless possibilities.

Every day we honor our iconic brand by offering quality coverage to millions of customers and being there when they need us most. We thrive through relentless innovation to exceed our customers’ expectations while making a real impact for our company through our shared purpose.

When you join our company, we want you to feel valued, supported and proud to work here. That’s why we offer The GEICO Pledge: Great Company, Great Culture, Great Rewards and Great Careers.

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer\-Applied AI to lead how Generative AI transforms the claims experience from intake to settlement. This is a hands\-on, senior individual contributor role for someone who combines deep technical skills and the ability to apply AI in complex, real\-world systems.

You will work closely with engineers, claims domain experts, and data scientists to design and deploy AI\-native capabilities that make claims faster, more accurate, and more transparent. Your mission is to prototype, validate, and scale intelligent systems that reduce manual effort, improve decisions, and elevate customer experience all while setting a high bar for technical and ethical AI use in insurance.

What you will do

  • Design and lead applied AI initiatives across the claim lifecycle (e.g., Claim intake, automation, document understanding, adjuster assist, fraud detection, coverage reasoning).
  • Prototype and build GenAI\-powered tools from RAG pipelines and domain\-tuned LLMs to intelligent workflow agents that operate on structured and unstructured claims data.
  • Experiment rigorously: define hypotheses, run evaluations, measure impact, and refine models in production.
  • Collaborate cross\-functionally with product, data, and claims operations to translate pain points into scalable AI solutions.
  • Guide a small team of engineers and scientists by influence, providing technical direction and mentorship on AI architecture, experimentation, and deployment.
  • Set standards for AI reliability, interpretability, and governance tailored to claims and regulatory constraints.
  • Stay on the frontier of AI capabilities continuously evaluating new tools, models, and frameworks to apply responsibly in claims contexts. What we are looking for

Must\-Have

  • 5\+ years of experience in applied machine learning or AI product engineering, including 2\+ years working with Generative AI or LLMs.
  • Deep hands\-on expertise in Python, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, or OpenAI/Anthropic APIs.
  • Proven ability to design, prototype, and ship AI solutions in real\-world domains (e.g., insurance, healthcare, finance, or legal).
  • Strong understanding of retrieval\-augmented generation (RAG), prompt engineering, text\-to\-structure extraction, and vector database design.
  • Ability to lead through influence, driving vision, technical direction, and experimentation within a small, cross\-functional team.
  • A track record of turning research ideas into working products with measurable outcomes.
  • Experience in building machine learning models.
  • Experience in applying AI to business or engineering needs.

Nice\-to\-Have:

  • Experience in claims, insurance, or regulated data systems.
  • Experience in building and running AI applications in Java (Spring AI, Langchain4j, Embabel...)
  • Background in document intelligence, fraud modeling, or knowledge graph reasoning.
  • Familiarity with AI safety, evaluation frameworks, and compliance practices.
  • Strong communication skills capable of articulating technical insights to business and product stakeholders.

Who you are

  • A builder first hands\-on with code, experiments, and prototypes.
  • A strategic thinker who connects emerging AI capability with tangible business impact.
  • A collaborative problem solver who thrives in ambiguous, high\-ownership environments.
  • Motivated by real\-world outcomes, not just model performance.

Why Join

  • Shape the next generation of AI\-powered claims systems.
  • Work on meaningful, high\-leverage problems with real operational impact.
  • Collaborate with a talented engineering team building the future of claims technology.
  • Define best practices for responsible AI deployment in one of the most data\-rich domains in the world

Annual Salary

$150,000\.00 \- $300,000\.00

The above annual salary range is a general guideline. Multiple factors are taken into consideration to arrive at the final hourly rate/ annual salary to be offered to the selected candidate. Factors include, but are not limited to, the scope and responsibilities of the role, the selected candidate’s work experience, education and training, the work location as well as market and business considerations.

GEICO will consider sponsoring a new qualified applicant for employment authorization for this position. The GEICO Pledge:

Great Company: At GEICO, we help our customers through life’s twists and turns. Our mission is to protect people when they need it most and we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of their needs.

We’re an iconic brand that thrives on innovation, exceeding our customers’ expectations and enabling our collective success. From day one, you’ll take on exciting challenges that help you grow and collaborate with dynamic teams who want to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

Great Careers: We offer a career where you can learn, grow, and thrive through personalized development programs, created with your career – and your potential – in mind. You’ll have access to industry leading training, certification assistance, career mentorship and coaching with supportive leaders at all levels.

Great Culture: We foster an inclusive culture of shared success, rooted in integrity, a bias for action and a winning mindset. Grounded by our core values, we have an an established culture of caring, inclusion, and belonging, that values different perspectives. Our teams are led by dynamic, multi\-faceted teams led by supportive leaders, driven by performance excellence and unified under a shared purpose.

As part of our culture, we also offer employee engagement and recognition programs that reward the positive impact our work makes on the lives of our customers.

Great Rewards: We offer compensation and benefits built to enhance your physical well\-being, mental and emotional health and financial future.

  • Comprehensive Total Rewards program that offers personalized coverage tailor\-made for you and your family’s overall well\-being.
  • Financial benefits including market\-competitive compensation; a 401K savings plan vested from day one that offers a 6% match; performance and recognition\-based incentives; and tuition assistance.
  • Access to additional benefits like mental healthcare as well as fertility and adoption assistance.
  • Supports flexibility\- We provide workplace flexibility as well as our GEICO Flex program, which offers the ability to work from anywhere in the US for up to four weeks per year.

The equal employment opportunity policy of the GEICO Companies provides for a fair and equal employment opportunity for all associates and job applicants regardless of race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, familial status, disability or genetic information, in compliance with applicable federal, state and local law. GEICO hires and promotes individuals solely on the basis of their qualifications for the job to be filled.

GEICO reasonably accommodates qualified individuals with disabilities to enable them to receive equal employment opportunity and/or perform the essential functions of the job, unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship to the Company. This applies to all applicants and associates. GEICO also provides a work environment in which each associate is able to be productive and work to the best of their ability. We do not condone or tolerate an atmosphere of intimidation or harassment. We expect and require the cooperation of all associates in maintaining an atmosphere free from discrimination and harassment with mutual respect by and for all associates and applicants.

Salary Context

This $150K-$300K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $100K across 15465 roles with salary data).

View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →

Role Details

Company GEICO
Title Distinguished Engineer - Applied AI
Location Bethesda, MD, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $150K - $300K
Remote No

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 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At GEICO, 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

Anthropic (3% of roles) Hugging Face (2% of roles) Langchain (4% of roles) Llama (2% of roles) Llamaindex (1% of roles) Openai (5% of roles) Prompt Engineering (6% of roles) Python (15% of roles) Rag (64% of roles)

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 $166,983 based on 13,781 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($225K) sits 35% above the category median. Disclosed range: $150K to $300K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Architect ($292,900). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.

GEICO AI Hiring

GEICO has 86 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Agent Developer, AI Software Engineer. Positions span Bethesda, MD, US, Palo Alto, CA, US, Seattle, WA, US. Compensation range: $157K - $494K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 7% (1,863 positions) offer remote work, while 24,200 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: Los Angeles (1,695 roles, $178,000 median); New York (1,670 roles, $200,000 median); San Francisco (1,059 roles, $244,000 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 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 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 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). 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 (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) 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 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 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 $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. 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 (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 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

Based on 13,781 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $166,983. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
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.
About 7% of the 26,159 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
GEICO is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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