Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at RWE?
Apply Now →About This Role
- Standort(e):
- Austin, TX, US, 78701
- Chicago, IL, US, 60654
RWE Americas, LLC
To start as soon as possible, full time, permanent
Functional area: Corporate Development / Strategy
Remuneration: Exempt
The AI Transformation team, part of the broader Strategy department, leads the company's AI agenda from ambition setting through blueprinting (designing AI\-enabled workflows) and execution. The team partners with the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) to define AI priorities and works closely with IT and business functions to deliver against the strategy. It also monitors the evolving AI landscape, translating emerging trends into actionable opportunities in collaboration with relevant business units.
Role Responsibilities:
- Lead and coordinate blueprinting sprints across AI initiatives \- a structured process where squads work directly with business departments to identify high\-value AI opportunities, build defensible business cases, and produce concrete execution plans \- facilitating workshops with business stakeholders, ensuring consistent application of the blueprint playbook, and translating learnings across initiatives into methodology updates that improve efficiency and scalability over time
- Support portfolio\-level AI use\-case prioritization and investment decisions, synthesizing value, feasibility, and data readiness assessments across initiatives to inform steering committee approvals
- Project manage key AI program initiatives end\-to\-end, from scoping and vendor selection through deployment and adoption, coordinating across business, IT, and vendor stakeholders to ensure timely delivery, and supporting RFP processes to drive well\-structured, aligned decisions
- Develop and coordinate enterprise change management frameworks across departments, driving adoption of AI\-enabled ways of working through targeted interventions including training, communications, and engagement programs, and tracking impact and cost metrics
- Support program\-level resource management and portfolio ROI optimization, maintaining visibility into cross\-functional capacity, monitoring cost\-to\-serve and value delivery, and surfacing recommendations to program leadership
- Own portfolio analytics and KPI tracking across the AI transformation program, converting performance data \- including adoption metrics, value delivery, and cost\-to\-serve \- into actionable insights that inform governance and executive decision\-making, ensuring alignment of value and cost tracking with broader RWE Americas processes and timelines
- Coordinate program governance and core process rhythms (e.g., steercos, stage\-gate reviews), ensuring cross\-workstream reporting is consistent, timely, and aligned with program objectives and RWEA processes
Job Requirements and Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in business, STEM, or related field preferred
- Minimum 7 years of relevant professional experience in management consulting, transformation program management, digital transformation, or related roles, with demonstrated experience independently driving large\-scale, cross\-functional AI or technology transformation programs
- Strong program management skills, with the ability to structure and track complex, concurrent initiatives across the full program portfolio
- Demonstrated ability to lead organizational or operational transformation efforts, including workflow redesign, business case development, and change management support, with a track record of driving adoption and delivering measurable outcomes
- Solid project management discipline, managing own workstreams with minimal oversight and ensuring execution rigor across phases
- Designing and operationalizing program\-level value tracking infrastructure, including dashboards and metrics frameworks for program performance measurement
- Hands\-on change management capability, developing and operationalizing portfolio\-level change plans into practical adoption collateral, training materials, and launch\-ready execution plans
- Working knowledge of AI concepts, generative AI, and digital product development sufficient to engage credibly with technical teams and contextualize business requirements
- Effective stakeholder management, building trust with cross\-functional partners across departments, product, IT, and finance to drive alignment and accountability without formal authority
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience preparing materials for steering committees and senior leadership
- Proactive and impact\-oriented, with high standards and the ability to iterate based on feedback to deliver quality output
- Motivated and effective self\-starter, with strong ownership, follow\-through, and the confidence to drive progress across multiple concurrent workstreams in ambiguous environments
- Experience in the power, utilities, or clean energy sector, including knowledge of U.S. power markets, renewable project development, and clean energy technologies preferred
- Proficiency in standard productivity tools (e.g., Excel, PowerPoint) and program/project management tools (e.g., Jira, Miro, or equivalent)
- This position is an office\-based role with some travel and visits to other RWE Americas offices and field locations
- Must be able to sit, walk, or stand for long durations of time
*Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. RWE Americas is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment visas at this time.*
Pay range: The annual base salary range for this position in Illinois is $160,000 \- $200,000\. The listed salary range represents our good faith estimate for this position and represents the range for new hire salaries across all U.S locations. Please note that the salary information is a general guideline only. RWE considers factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate’s education \& work experience, training \& certifications, and key skills as well as market and business considerations at the time of the offer.
Benefits offered: Medical, Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, Short\-Term Disability, Long\-Term Disability, 401(k) match, Flexible Spending Accounts, EAP, Education Assistance, Parental Leave, Paid time off, and Holidays. Eligible employees also participate in short\-term incentives, in addition to salary.
Apply with just a few clicks: ad code 92976\. Any questions? Contact HR: rwe\_americas\[email protected]
We look forward to meeting you. Of course, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Xing, too.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other legally protected status.
RWE Americas, a subsidiary of RWE, is a US\-based energy company that is helping to meet the growing demand for energy across the United States. Backed by RWE’s 125\-year global legacy of managing diverse power assets, RWE Americas operates approximately 13 GW of power projects across 27 states. With a talented workforce of 2,000 employees, RWE Americas develops, constructs and operates wind, solar and battery storage projects, along with natural gas\-powered generation, that safely deliver affordable, reliable electricity to our customers. Committed to responsible development, RWE Americas invests in local and rural communities, creating jobs and partnering with stakeholders to support and strengthen the places where we live and work. This is complemented by RWE’s energy trading business. RWE is also a major offtaker of American liquified natural gas (LNG). Learn more about how RWE Americas is generating impact at americas.rwe.com.
At RWE Americas, we foster a culture defined by our Essential Behaviors \- Have Courage, Create Impact and Actively Collaborate. We encourage bold thinking and continuous learning, and we value ownership, resilience and inclusion in everything we do. When you join us, you become part of a team that supports your development, respects your contributions and celebrates shared success. This is a place where you can grow your career and make a meaningful difference.
Salary Context
This $160K-$200K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $180K across 1841 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 3,708 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At RWE, 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 in Demand for This Role
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. This role's midpoint ($180K) sits 18% below the category median. Disclosed range: $160K to $200K.
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.
RWE AI Hiring
RWE has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Product Manager, AI/ML Engineer. Positions span Chicago, IL, US, Austin, TX, US. Compensation range: $200K - $200K.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $214,343 across 87 tracked positions.
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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