Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Slalom Consulting?
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About This Role
General Information
Locations
- Orange County, CA
- San Diego, CA
Business Function Customer experience Date posted Monday, April 6, 2026 Ref # 827 Description and Requirements
Job Description
Senior Agentic Designer
Are you a designer who can read and write code? Have you been expanding your own skills in design, prompt and context engineering? Do you lead with deep design craft, earn trust across product and engineering, and still roll up your sleeves to build? Do you look at the way teams collaborate today and already see what it needs to become?
Our experience design team believes that this is the moment in which design takes its next major step forward in creating experiences that are measured in customer value vs technological complexity.
We are seeking a Senior Consultant or Principal Agentic Designer to help define and lead the next era of digital product innovation at Slalom. This is a product design role with advanced design engineering capabilities that will work with our growing team of agentic designers to showcase what’s possible when design craft meets AI-assisted iteration and speed.
Your ability to drive design with new skills while collaborating with client and Slalom teams will help you grow as a leader in the field during this critical junction for design.
What You'll Do
Design Engineering & Build
- Lead design engineering execution on accelerated product builds and participate in innovation workshops
- Build production-quality interfaces using agentic coding assistants, bridging the gap between prototype and the foundational code engineering teams build from
- Leverage context engineering systems for complex engagements: layered memory systems, structured project context, and shared documentation that keeps product, design, and engineering working from a single source of truth
- Collaborate deeply with development teams throughout delivery as a true cross-functional partner
Design & UX Leadership
- Own product design direction across complex, cross-functional engagements spanning the creation of specifications through interaction and visual design
- Steward design system integrity across large, multi-team product builds, ensuring coherence at scale
- Drive iterative testing programs that evolve designs based on real user data, not assumptions
- Serve as a senior design voice in client relationships, VP-level conversations, and cross-functional planning
- Mentor and elevate the design craft of Design Engineers, Product Designers, and junior team members
What You Bring
Engineering & AI
- Demonstrated expertise building production-quality applications using agentic coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, GitHub Copilot)
- Has implemented and leveraged structured documentation that allows AI assistants to maintain persistent, shared context across disciplines at the program level
- Strong command of Git workflows, IDEs, and deployment platforms; comfortable contributing to production codebases
Design & Product Leadership
- 5+ years of experience in product design, UX design, or design engineering (professional services experience preferred)
- A portfolio demonstrating systems-level thinking, GenAI processes, design craft, and shipping velocity across multiple product types
- Deep expertise in Figma and design systems at scale
- Proven experience working in close partnership with product owners and engineering leads in Agile delivery environments
Slalom is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.
About Us
Slalom is a fiercely human business and technology consulting company that leads with outcomes to bring more value, in all ways, always. From strategy through delivery, our agile teams across 52 offices in 12 countries partner with clients to co-create powerful customer experiences, modern ways of working, and meaningful impact.
What sets us apart? We believe work should be challenging and fulfilling, not perfect, but possible. That’s why we prioritize purpose, flexibility, connection, and recognition, so our people can thrive and love what they do, most days.
Compensation and Benefits
Slalom prides itself on helping team members thrive in their work and life. As a result, Slalom is proud to invest in benefits that include meaningful time off and paid holidays, parental leave, 401(k) with a match, a range of choices for highly subsidized health, dental, & vision coverage, adoption and fertility assistance, and short/long-term disability. We also offer yearly $350 reimbursement account for any well-being-related expenses, as well as discounted home, auto, and pet insurance.
Slalom is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. For this role, we are hiring at the following levels and targeted base pay salary ranges: The targeted base salary pay range for Senior Consultant in San Diego and Orange County is $112,000 to $141,000 and for Principal Consultant in San Diego and Orange County is $142,000 to $178,000. In addition, individuals may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. Actual compensation will depend upon an individual’s skills, experience, qualifications, location, and other relevant factors. The salary pay range is subject to change and may be modified at any time.
We are committed to pay transparency and compliance with applicable laws. If you have questions or concerns about the pay range or other compensation information in this posting, please contact us at: [email protected].
EEO and Accommodations
Slalom is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to attracting, developing and retaining highly qualified talent who empower our innovative teams through unique perspectives and experiences. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veterans’ status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Slalom will also consider qualified applications with criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Slalom welcomes and encourages applications from individuals with disabilities. Reasonable accommodations are available for candidates during all aspects of the selection process. Please advise the talent acquisition team or contact [email protected] if you require accommodations during the interview process.
Salary Context
This $112K-$178K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 1356 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 8,943 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 75% of the market. At Slalom Consulting, 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 $212,000 based on 11,866 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($145K) sits 32% below the category median. Disclosed range: $112K to $178K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,250; VP: $235,000.
Slalom Consulting AI Hiring
Slalom Consulting has 12 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Engineer, AI Architect. Positions span Houston, TX, US, Atlanta, GA, US, Denver, CO, US. Compensation range: $150K - $285K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (521 positions) offer remote work, while 8,351 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,416 roles, $263,811 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 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 8,943 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 175 entry-level, 4,132 mid-level, 3,268 senior, and 1,368 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (521 positions). The remaining 8,351 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,380. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,148. The 90th percentile reaches $319,310. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 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 8,943 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,739), AI Product Manager (403), AI Software Engineer (402). 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 (175) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,132) and senior (3,268) 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 1,368 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (521 positions), with 8,351 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 $213,380. Top-quartile roles start at $264,148, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,310. 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 $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. 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 (1,422 postings), Aws (808 postings), Azure (638 postings), Rag (555 postings), Gcp (457 postings), Pytorch (433 postings), Claude (341 postings), Kubernetes (337 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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