Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Slalom Consulting?
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About This Role
General Information
Locations
- Chicago, IL
- Detroit, MI
- Kansas City, MO
- Minneapolis, MN
- St. Louis, MO
Business Function Data & analytics Date posted Tuesday, October 13, 2026 Ref # JBR0001930 Description and Requirements
Job Description Who You’ll Work With Slalom is seeking a strategic and client-focused AI & Data Strategist to help organizations unlock business value through data, analytics, and AI transformation. In this role, you will partner with executive and business leaders to shape enterprise AI and data strategies, define governance and operating models, and guide organizations from vision through execution.
You will serve as a trusted advisor to clients, blending expertise in AI, data strategy, business transformation, and organizational change to design scalable, responsible, and business-aligned solutions. This role requires both strategic leadership and practical delivery experience, with the ability to bridge executive priorities and technical implementation realities.
You will also contribute to Slalom’s growth through client relationship development, thought leadership, mentoring, and business development support.
What You’ll Do
- Lead executive workshops and discovery sessions to assess business priorities, AI readiness, data maturity, and organizational capabilities.
- Develop enterprise AI and data strategies, operating models, governance approaches, and implementation roadmaps aligned to client business goals and technical maturity.
- Identify, evaluate, and prioritize high-impact AI and data opportunities across business functions, translating complex challenges into practical transformation strategies and execution plans.
- Advise clients on foundational data capabilities required for AI success, including governance, data quality, modern data platforms, interoperability, and responsible AI practices.
- Partner with architects, engineers, data scientists, designers, and business stakeholders to align strategic recommendations with delivery realities and organizational change needs.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to senior client stakeholders, facilitating cross-functional alignment and providing leadership across strategic engagements.
- Support business development activities including proposals, RFP responses, client presentations, and pursuit strategy for AI and data consulting opportunities.
- Develop executive-ready deliverables including strategy presentations, assessments, business cases, white papers, and market insights while contributing to Slalom’s practice development through mentoring, reusable assets, and thought leadership.
Stay current on emerging trends in AI, generative AI, autonomous agents, analytics, and intelligent automation, translating innovation into practical client value. *
What You’ll Bring
- 7+ years of experience in consulting, enterprise strategy, digital transformation, data strategy, analytics, or technology advisory roles, including experience leading client-facing engagements.
- 3+ years of experience focused on AI, data, analytics, or intelligent automation initiatives.
- Proven experience developing enterprise AI and/or data strategies, with a strong understanding of governance, data architecture, modern data platforms, analytics ecosystems, and responsible AI principles.
- Familiarity with AI/ML technologies and platforms including generative AI, LLMs, Azure, AWS, Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, Google Cloud, or similar ecosystems.
- Exceptional communication, facilitation, and presentation skills, with the ability to engage senior stakeholders and simplify complex technical concepts for executive and non-technical audiences.
- Strong consulting and problem-solving skills, including stakeholder management, executive storytelling, workshop facilitation, and cross-functional collaboration.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in one or more industries such as healthcare, life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, retail, energy, or public sector.
- Experience with enterprise data modernization, cloud transformation, analytics transformation, or AI operating model initiatives.
- Knowledge of AI governance, responsible AI frameworks, data privacy regulations, and emerging global AI regulations.
- Familiarity with tools such as Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, or data modeling platforms.
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 this position is $135,000 to $165,000. 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]. Please note, this recipient is not able to support recruitment inquiries beyond this purpose.
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 $135K-$165K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 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 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% 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 $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($150K) sits 29% below the category median. Disclosed range: $135K to $165K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Slalom Consulting AI Hiring
Slalom Consulting has 14 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Architect. Positions span Houston, TX, US, Chicago, IL, US, CA, US. Compensation range: $142K - $280K.
Location Context
AI roles in Chicago pay a median of $193,440 across 429 tracked positions. That's 9% below 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 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 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 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). 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 (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) 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 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 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 $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. 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 $256,000 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 (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 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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