Assistant to VP/SVP, AI Research and Systems

$74K - $112K San Diego, CA, US Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

Rag

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Company:

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Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Job Area:

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Administration Group, Administration Group > Administrative Support

General Summary:

The Qualcomm AI Research and Systems organization is looking for an experienced Assistant to VP/SVP who can join a rapidly growing and dynamic organization. Qualcomm is at the heart of innovation for the intelligent age, driving both AI and 6G, and the AI Research and Systems organization plays a key role in pushing frontier research and transferring technology toward commercialization across Qualcomm’s various business units.

Summary:

  • Provides complex and advanced administrative assistance to the Principal Engineer of AI Research and Systems, along with the corresponding key staff and direct reports.
  • Applies advanced knowledge of industry standards in various administrative areas, including policies, guidelines, and procedures.
  • Leverages advanced proficiency in various types of software including Microsoft Office Suite (Outlook, Word, Excel, & PowerPoint) and shared file services (SharePoint, MS Teams, OneDrive, etc.) to provide effective and efficient support.
  • Handles tasks ranging from daily meeting management to travel arrangements and expenses, coordination of group events, leadership workshops, seminars and other related activities.
  • Exercises professional and ethical judgement as work is generally of a critical or confidential nature. Assignments may be of a diverse scope and related to various functional areas.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • 5+ years of work experience in a role requiring interaction with VP and/or SVPs.
  • 5+ years of experience working in a global, matrixed organization.

PRINCIPAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Provides complex assistance and support to a VP, SVP, and/or department VPs and Senior Directors.
  • Acts as an information source and provides guidance to other administrative employees regarding departmental/company policies and procedures.
  • Compiles information from various sources and prepares complex correspondences, reports, spreadsheets, and presentations for internal and external stakeholders.
  • Manages advanced calendar needs for multiple VPs and above, including making calendar decisions on their behalf to effectively prioritize their time and resources.
  • Expertly completes various office tasks (e.g., iProc creation, using a Pcard, maintaining office files, supplies, and equipment, submitting expense reports and checking requests, arranging for shipping, maintaining vendor tracking and support, creating/requesting NDAs, creating internal and external collaboration tools, etc.).
  • Coordinates advanced domestic and complex international travel (flights, hotel, rental cars, etc.) for multiple travelers and trips with multiple connections and countries. This includes an advanced understanding of travel visas and documentation as well as expense reconciliation.
  • Answers, screens, routes and/or responds to internal (with exposure/requests from multiple VPs and above) and external emails.
  • Arranges and coordinates various complex types of meetings including luncheons, conferences, training sessions, and team building events. These events may include external customers and vendors.
  • Recommends creative ways to improve existing methods that increase administrative efficiencies; identifies ways to incorporate new ideas into solutions and procedures.

Level of Responsibility:

  • Works independently with no supervision.
  • Provides guidance to other team members.
  • Decision-making is significant in nature and affects work beyond immediate work group.
  • Requires verbal and written communication skills to convey complex information. May require negotiation, influence, tact, etc.
  • Works within the prescribed budgetary objectives of the department.
  • Has a moderate amount of influence over key organizational decisions (e.g., is consulted by senior leadership to make key decisions).
  • Tasks often require multiple steps which can be performed in various orders; extensive planning, problem-solving, and prioritization must occur to complete the tasks effectively.

Minimum Qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree and 4+ years of Administrative Assistant or related work experience.

OR

Associate's degree and 6+ years of Administrative Assistant or related work experience.

OR

High School Diploma or equivalent and 8+ years of Administrative Assistant or related work experience.

  • Completed advanced degrees in a relevant field may be substituted for up to two years (Master’s = one year, Doctorate = two years) of work experience.

Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail disability-accomodations@qualcomm.com or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

To all Staffing and Recruiting Agencies: Our Careers Site is only for individuals seeking a job at Qualcomm. Staffing and recruiting agencies and individuals being represented by an agency are not authorized to use this site or to submit profiles, applications or resumes, and any such submissions will be considered unsolicited. Qualcomm does not accept unsolicited resumes or applications from agencies. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Qualcomm employees or any other company location. Qualcomm is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes/applications.

EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.

Qualcomm expects its employees to abide by all applicable policies and procedures, including but not limited to security and other requirements regarding protection of Company confidential information and other confidential and/or proprietary information, to the extent those requirements are permissible under applicable law.

Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits:

$36.15 - $54.23

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.

Salary Context

This $74K-$112K range is in the lower quartile 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

Company Qualcomm
Title Assistant to VP/SVP, AI Research and Systems
Location San Diego, CA, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary $74K - $112K
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 37,339 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Qualcomm, 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

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 $154,000 based on 8,743 positions with disclosed compensation. This role's midpoint ($93K) sits 39% below the category median. Disclosed range: $74K to $112K.

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.

Qualcomm AI Hiring

Qualcomm has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Diego, CA, US. Compensation range: $112K - $112K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 7% (2,732 positions) offer remote work, while 34,484 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,633 roles, $204,100 median); Los Angeles (1,356 roles, $179,440 median); San Francisco (1,230 roles, $240,000 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 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

Based on 8,743 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $154,000. 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 37,339 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.
Qualcomm 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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