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About This Role
At NTT DATA, we know that with the right people on board, anything is possible. The quality, integrity, and commitment of our employees have been key factors in our company's growth and market presence. By hiring the best people and helping them grow both professionally and personally, we ensure a bright future for NTT DATA and for the people who work here.
For more than 25 years, NTT DATA Services have focused on impacting the core of your business operations with industry\-leading outsourcing services and automation. With our industry\-specific platforms, we deliver continuous value addition, and innovation that will improve your business outcomes. Outsourcing is not just a method of gaining a one\-time cost advantage, but an effective strategy for gaining and maintaining competitive advantages when executed as part of an overall sourcing strategy.
NTT DATA Services currently seeks a Distinguished AI Engineerto join our team in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Role purpose
Set the architecture, engineering standards, platform strategy, and technical governance for enterprise AI and GenAI capabilities. This role guides senior engineering teams and ensures AI platforms are scalable, reusable, observable, cost\-efficient, and compliant with enterprise risk expectations.
Primary ownership
- Target\-state enterprise AI architecture, reference patterns, and platform guardrails.
- LLMOps, AI gateways, model\-serving strategy, evaluation platforms, observability, governance, and operating standards.
- Technical assurance for high\-risk or high\-impact AI initiatives.
Key responsibilities* Define target\-state architecture for LLM platforms, model hubs, AI gateways, RAG services, agent frameworks, orchestration layers, and model\-serving infrastructure.
- Establish enterprise standards for AI SDLC, LLMOps, MLOps, evaluation, release management, operational resilience, and production support.
- Guide architecture for secure, scalable, and cost\-efficient inference across cloud, hybrid, private, and containerized environments.
- Define guardrail patterns for hallucination mitigation, bias monitoring, harmful\-content controls, prompt injection defense, data leakage prevention, and human oversight.
- Lead design reviews for critical AI systems and provide technical assurance to architecture and risk forums.
- Partner with cybersecurity, risk, compliance, legal, audit, product, and business teams to align AI designs with enterprise controls.
- Mentor principal engineers and establish reusable design patterns, reference implementations, and engineering playbooks.
- Assess emerging AI technologies and recommend adoption based on business value, maturity, risk, cost, and regulatory fit.
Must\-have candidate profile* 10\+ years in AI/ML systems, distributed systems, enterprise architecture, or platform engineering.
- Deep experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, model serving, AI orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and AI infrastructure.
- Proven track record defining architecture and technical standards across multiple engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of distributed training, GPU infrastructure, inference optimization, observability, model governance, and resiliency.
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders and operate across business, technology, risk, compliance, and architecture forums.
Preferred experience* Global bank, fintech, financial\-services, or regulated\-enterprise platform experience.
- Experience with enterprise AI platforms, private LLM deployments, internal model hubs, AI gateways, or multi\-cloud AI strategy.
- Familiarity with Responsible AI, model risk management, audit expectations, and technology risk controls.
About NTT DATA Services:
NTT DATA Services is a recognized leader in IT and business services, including cloud, data and applications, headquartered in Texas. As part of NTT DATA, a $30 billion trusted global innovator with a combined global reach of over 80 countries, we help clients transform through business and technology consulting, industry and digital solutions, applications development and management, managed edge\-to\-cloud infrastructure services, BPO, systems integration and global data centers. We are committed to our clients' long\-term success. Visit nttdata.com or LinkedIn to learn more.
NTT DATA Services is an equal opportunity employer and considers all applicants without regarding to race, color, religion, citizenship, national origin, ancestry, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, physical or mental disability, veteran or marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment for all employees. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter so that we may connect you with the appropriate team.
Where required by law, NTT DATA provides a reasonable range of compensation for specific roles. The starting hourly range for this remote role is ($x \- x/hourly ). This range reflects the minimum and maximum target compensation for the position across all US locations. Actual compensation will depend on several factors, including the candidate's actual work location, relevant experience, technical skills, and other qualifications.
This position is eligible for company benefits that will depend on the nature of the role offered. Company benefits may include medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible spending or health savings account, life, and AD\&D insurance, short\-and long\-term disability coverage, paid time off, employee assistance, participation in a 401k program with company match, and additional voluntary or legally required benefits.
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 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At NTT DATA, 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 $218,750 based on 3,817 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,000.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($300,000) and Research Engineer ($280,000). By seniority level: Entry: $120,000; Mid: $200,000; Senior: $230,000; Director: $272,150; VP: $250,000.
NTT DATA AI Hiring
NTT DATA has 14 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Consultant, AI/ML Engineer, AI Architect, Prompt Engineer. Positions span Plano, TX, US, Atlanta, GA, US, Irving, TX, US. Compensation range: $114K - $426K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 14% (508 positions) offer remote work, while 3,180 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,045 roles, $220,000 median); San Francisco (810 roles, $277,088 median); Los Angeles (397 roles, $215,000 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 3,708 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 102 entry-level, 1,705 mid-level, 1,469 senior, and 432 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 14% of the market (508 positions). The remaining 3,180 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $217,500. Top-quartile compensation starts at $272,100. The 90th percentile reaches $325,000. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($300,000 median, 21 roles); Research Engineer ($280,000 median, 147 roles); AI Architect ($254,798 median, 67 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 3,708 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,605), Data Scientist (310), AI Software Engineer (259). 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 (102) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,705) and senior (1,469) 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 432 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 14% of all AI roles (508 positions), with 3,180 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 $217,500. Top-quartile roles start at $272,100, and the 90th percentile reaches $325,000. 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 $300,000 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 (1,890 postings), Aws (1,103 postings), Azure (877 postings), Rag (855 postings), Gcp (631 postings), Prompt Engineering (560 postings), Pytorch (545 postings), Claude (498 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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