Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at SIA?
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Company Description
Sia is a next\-generation, global management consulting group. Founded in 1999, we were born digital. Today our strategy and management capabilities are augmented by data science, enhanced by creativity and driven by responsibility. We’re optimists for change and we help clients initiate, navigate and benefit from transformation. We believe optimism is a force multiplier, helping clients to mitigate downside and maximize opportunity. With expertise across a broad range of sectors and services, our 3,000 consultants serve clients worldwide from 48 locations in 19 countries. Our expertise delivers results. Our optimism transforms outcomes.
About Sia Experience\-Marketing Advisory
Sia Experience is the end\-to\-end marketing and customer experience arm of Sia. Agile and collaborative, our Marketing AdvisoryBusiness Line is recognized for delivering high\-impact, growth\-focused solutions by blending marketing, CX, creative, AI, and deep industry expertise.
As strategic partners, The Marketing Advisory team empowers clients across technology, luxury, consumer goods, finance, energy, and more to scale operational excellence and drive brand\-led growth through AI\- and data\-driven strategies. Our teams lead full\-funnel marketing transformations—from strategy and go\-to\-market execution to experience design, performance measurement, and sustainable impact.
It’s an exciting time to join us. SiaX has long been the agency behind some of the world’s biggest brands—now we’re expanding, becoming one of the most recognizable names for companies that demand bold, business\-driving creative. We’re shaping SiaX into the go\-to agency of the future. This is your chance to be part of that growth, working alongside top\-tier creatives, consultants and agency leaders to continuously evolve what a modern, full\-service agency can be. Opportunities like this don’t come around often—if you want in on the next level, this is it.
Job Description
We are looking for a Managing Director who is as comfortable closing a new engagement as they are leading one. You have spent your career in consulting environments, you know the model, you've built the relationships, and you have a network that opens doors at the kind of companies we work with. You bring a point of view to every room you walk into, and clients seek you out because of it. You are energized by building and finding the next opportunity, shaping what it looks like, and assembling the right team to execute. When you're not selling the work you're leading it, and when you're not leading it, you're figuring out how to scale it.
This role sits at the intersection of business development, thought leadership, and senior practice leadership, owning client relationships, driving revenue, and contributing to practice growth.
What You'll Do
*Thought Leadership \& Market Presence*
- Develop and champion a distinctive point of view on AI, marketing transformation, and enterprise marketing trends, bringing those perspectives into client conversations, business development efforts, and practice strategy.
- Design and evolve operating models, delivery frameworks, and performance infrastructure that enable the practice to scale while maintaining quality and consistency.
- Drive AI adoption across client engagements and internal operations, embedding it as a core capability throughout the practice.
- Represent Sia externally through industry events, executive forums, and thought leadership content that strengthens our market presence and credibility.
*Business Development \& Client Growth*
- Originate and expand marketing advisory engagements across industries, identifying opportunities, leading pursuits, and converting them into long\-term client relationships.
- Meet and exceed revenue targets through a combination of new business development, account expansion, and strategic relationship management.
- Leverage an established executive network to create access, build trust, and advance opportunities within large, complex organizations.
- Lead the commercial strategy for new and existing engagements, including solution design, pricing, and positioning.
- Partner with practice leadership to identify growth opportunities, shape go\-to\-market strategies and expand Sia's presence in key markets.
*Client Leadership*
- Serve as the executive sponsor and trusted advisor for a portfolio of strategic client relationships, ensuring alignment, delivery excellence, and measurable business outcomes.
- Lead executive\-level engagement across complex organizations, effectively navigating multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.
- Expand existing engagements by identifying emerging client needs and developing solutions that deepen Sia's impact.
- Own the financial performance of your portfolio, managing engagement economics and profitability with discipline and accountability.
*People \& Team*
- Build and lead a high\-performing consulting team where talented professionals are challenged, supported, and developed.
- Set clear expectations and maintain a high standard of quality through coaching, mentorship, and leadership.
- Foster a culture that develops future leaders and creates opportunities for advancement across the practice.
Qualifications
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area
- 15\+ years in management consulting or a comparable advisory environment, with a track record of growing client relationships and driving revenue at a senior level
- A network and presence within enterprise technology and/or SaaS with the ability to access and build relationships at organizations with significant marketing budgets and organizational complexity
- Demonstrated experience leading and selling consulting engagements, not just delivering them
- Deep expertise in enterprise marketing and a strong understanding of how AI is reshaping marketing organizations, operating models, and customer engagement
- Strong commercial instincts comfortable with P\&L accountability, pricing, and the economics of a consulting engagement
- Exceptional communicator and presenter, with the executive presence to lead conversations at the most senior levels of a client organization
- Highly organized and capable of managing a complex, multi\-client portfolio without losing precision
- Experience in GTM ecosystems of large tech and SaaS companies, performance marketing, product marketing, marketing operations, analytics
- Experience building or scaling a practice, team, or business unit
- Bachelor's or Master's degree; MBA a plus
Additional Information External Market Leadership \& Visibility
Candidates must demonstrate an established external presence, including active participation in industry\-facing activities, such as:
- Speaking engagements at industry conferences, client forums, or professional events
- Panel participation or moderation on relevant business, functional, or industry topics
- Professional memberships in recognized industry associations or advisory councils
- Regular attendance and/or leadership involvement in executive\-level events or forums that support brand building, client development, or thought leadership
Compensation \& Benefits
We believe in supporting our team professionally and personally. Here’s a snapshot of the comprehensive benefits you’ll enjoy as part of Sia.
Competitive Compensation
- Annual Base Salary Range: $200,000 \- $250,000, commensurate with experience and qualifications
- Personal Sales Bonus
- Individual Bonus (annual/discretionary)
Robust Health Coverage
- 3 Medical plans
- Dental and Vision
- Life, AD\&D and other voluntary insurance
Tax\-Advantaged Accounts
- 401K retirement plan
- 4% matching and 100% vested upon enrollment
- Health Savings Account (HSA)
- Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
- Health, Dependent Care, Commuter
Family Friendly Benefits
- 100% paid parental leave for all new parents with eligible tenure
- Building Healthy Families program if enrolled through Medical plan
Time Off to Recharge
- Generous Paid Time Off (PTO) policy
- 9 company holidays plus 1 floating holiday
Extras that Make Life Easier
- College savings and student loan repayment assistance
- Monthly cell phone stipend
- Access to wellness programs at no cost if enrolled through Medical plan, including:
+ Gym membership reimbursement
+ LiveHealth Online virtual care
+ Personalized support from a Well\-being Coach
- Employee Assistance Program at no cost
+ Free confidential counseling and emotional support services
+ On\-demand access to Emotional Well\-being resources (ranging from relaxation techniques to stress management)
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion \& Belonging
At Sia, we believe in fostering a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture where our employees and partners are valued and thrive in a sense of belonging. We are committed to recruiting and developing a diverse network of employees and investing in their growth by providing unique opportunities for professional and cultural immersion. Our commitment toward inclusion motivates dynamic collaboration with our clients, building trust by creating an inclusive environment of curiosity and learning which affects lasting impact. Please visit our website for more information.
Sia is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment, including hiring, promotion, remuneration, or discipline, are based solely on performance, competence, conduct, or business needs.
Office Workplace Guidelines
Sia is committed to providing a flexible workplace environment that supports client, business, and market needs. Consultants located in our primary market office locations—New York City, Charlotte, Seattle, and San Francisco—are expected to live within a reasonable commuting distance. Managing Directors are expected to work from the office full time, five days per week. This reflects the critical leadership role Managing Directors play in driving our business, fostering collaboration and strengthening client relationships.
Work Authorization \& Sponsorship
At this time, Sia does not intend to employ any applicant who will require, either now or in the future, employment visa sponsorship or sponsorship for work authorization (i.e., H1\-B visa, F\-1/OPT) or STEM OPT, TN, etc).
Sia is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment, including hiring, promotion, remuneration, or discipline, are based solely on performance, competence, conduct, or business needs.
Salary Context
This $200K-$250K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 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 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At SIA, 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 $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $243,000. This role's midpoint ($225K) sits 26% above the category median. Disclosed range: $200K to $250K.
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 ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.
SIA AI Hiring
SIA has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span San Francisco, CA, US, New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $110K - $250K.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $253,000 across 1,990 tracked positions. That's 26% above the national 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 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 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 ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 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 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). 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 (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) 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 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 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 $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. 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 (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 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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