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About This Role
Consultant MQs (Minimum / Mandatory Qualifications)
The proposed consultant must meet all MQs or they can be rejected during Phase 1\.
MQ \#1
10\+ years of Project Management experience
Must include:
- Managing complex projects
- Project budgets over $1M
- Experience with PM tools:
- Microsoft Project
- Jira
- Confluence (or similar)
- Experience with:
- Agile
- Waterfall methodologies
MQ \#2
2\+ years of AI / ML and Data Analytics project management experience
Must demonstrate:
- Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning project delivery
- Data analytics project experience
- Understanding of:
- AI/ML concepts
- Data pipelines
- Model lifecycle management
MQ \#3
5\+ years leading cross\-functional teams and managing multiple concurrent projects
Must show:
- Cross\-functional leadership
- Multiple simultaneous projects
- Team coordination and stakeholder management
MQ \#4
Bachelor’s Degree
Degree in:
- Computer Science
- Information Technology
- Data Science
- Related field
DQs (Desirable Qualifications)
These are scored and can help win Phase 2 technical evaluation points.
DQ \#1
5\+ years reviewing or creating:
- AI technical documentation
- Cloud architecture diagrams
- API manuals
DQ \#2
3\+ years of:
- Data governance
- Security standards
- Compliance standards
DQ \#3
2\+ years managing cloud\-based projects
Examples:
- Azure
- AWS
- AI services
DQ \#4
Strong:
- Problem solving
- Decision making
- Collaboration skills
(pass/fail style qualification)
DQ \#5
Ability and willingness to work:
Onsite 5 days/week in West Sacramento
Bonus certifications that could help:
- PMP
- Scrum Master
- Azure AI Engineer
- AWS AI/ML certifications
- SAFe
- Data governance/security certifications
Pay: $90\.00 \- $110\.00 per hour
Work Location: In person
Salary Context
This $187K-$228K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 2088 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 4,021 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Oricube, 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 $180,000 based on 12,397 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $163,400. This role's midpoint ($208K) sits 16% above the category median. Disclosed range: $187K to $228K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($290,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,760; Mid: $163,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,800; VP: $250,000.
Oricube AI Hiring
Oricube has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Sacramento, CA, US. Compensation range: $228K - $228K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (608 positions) offer remote work, while 3,392 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,585 roles, $210,300 median); San Francisco (2,102 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,764 roles, $190,500 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 4,021 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 118 entry-level, 1,906 mid-level, 1,555 senior, and 442 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (608 positions). The remaining 3,392 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($290,000 median, 39 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 52 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 421 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 4,021 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,818), Data Scientist (312), AI Software Engineer (280). 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 (118) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,906) and senior (1,555) 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 442 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (608 positions), with 3,392 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 $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, 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 $290,000 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 (2,069 postings), Aws (1,260 postings), Azure (946 postings), Rag (893 postings), Gcp (783 postings), Pytorch (624 postings), Prompt Engineering (619 postings), Claude (570 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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