Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Sustainment?
Apply Now →Skills & Technologies
About This Role
Company Overview: Sustainment is an AI\-native software platform that helps US\-based manufacturers easily find and work with the critical suppliers they need to build and manage their supply chains. Our vision is to reimagine American manufacturing as a hyperconnected, secure, and resilient ecosystem of local and regional suppliers who can more easily connect, interact, and do business with the industry and government customers that rely on them. We are a dual\-use technology platform that supports both DoD and commercial customers in pursuit of our vision.
This is a contract opportunity
Job Overview: We are seeking a QA Engineer to help ensure the reliability, accuracy, and robustness of our AI Agents. This role will focus on data quality, model evaluation, and regression testing frameworks to identify and mitigate common LLM failure modes. You will be responsible for designing automated and scalable quality assurance systems while working in an AWS\-based infrastructure. If you have a strong background in LLM testing, data validation, and automated QA frameworks, this role is an excellent opportunity to contribute to cutting\-edge AI systems.
Responsibilities:
- Design and run regression test suites for LLM evaluation.
- Identify and track LLM failure modes, including hallucinations, biases, factual inconsistencies, and logical errors.
- Design data\-quality checks to assess training and test datasets.
- Automate LLM performance monitoring using advanced metrics and validation strategies.
- Apply best practices for prompt\-engineering testing, fine\-tuning validation, and output\-consistency analysis.
- Collaborate with ML engineers, data scientists, and product teams to align on quality benchmarks.
- Work within an AWS ecosystem, leveraging services such as EKS, S3, SageMaker, or Databricks for model testing and evaluation.
- Build tools and dashboards to track LLM quality over time.
- Curate and version the ground\-truth datasets that serve as the accuracy baseline for document parsing, and translate business and domain requirements into written, testable field definitions (partnering with the labeling team on annotation guidelines).
- Evaluate structured extraction from real business documents (multi\-page PDFs, scans, spreadsheets) by scoring model output field\-by\-field against ground truth, with tolerance\-aware comparison for numbers, dates, free text, and repeated structures.
- Maintain the ground\-truth corpus as a versioned, evolving test asset: keep existing annotations valid as extraction schemas change, preserve dataset provenance, and grow the corpus from real production failures so every customer\-reported miss becomes a permanent regression case.
- Calibrate and validate automated scoring itself; confirm that semantic/LLM\-judge scoring agrees with human judgment.
Qualifications:
- 3\+ years in software testing and quality assurance
- 2\+ years with a focus on ML evaluation, NLP, LLMs, VLMs, etc.
- Deep understanding of LLM data quality challenges and common failure modes.
- Experience designing automated tests for AI/ML models.
- Familiarity with Python and testing frameworks such as PyTest, Hypothesis, or similar.
- Knowledge of evaluation metrics for LLMs (DeepEval, MLflow, LangSmith, or similar).
- Hands\-on experience with automated data validation techniques.
- Strong debugging and analytical skills.
- Experience creating or working with labeled evaluation datasets ("golden" sets) for model evaluation.
- Working knowledge of evaluation metrics for structured information extraction: field\-level precision, recall, and F1; exact vs. fuzzy matching; numeric tolerance; and alignment of repeated or nested records.
- Experience translating ambiguous business requirements into precise, documented field definitions in collaboration with non\-technical subject\-matter experts.
Preferred Qualifications
- SQL proficiency, including seeding test data across Postgres environments (local/dev/staging/prod).
- Comfort with observability and incident\-response tooling (e.g., Datadog monitors, alerting/triage) for monitoring and debugging.
- Familiarity with RAG and RAGAS.
- Familiarity with containerized dev environments (Kubernetes/Tilt).
- Understanding of human\-in\-the\-loop (HITL) evaluation strategies.
- Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, or similar).
- Background in statistical analysis or model interpretability.
- Experience with MLOps practices and CI/CD pipelines for ML models.
- Experience evaluating document AI / OCR pipelines and their specific failure modes: layout and table extraction, multi\-page documents, scanned or low\-quality source material.
- Experience running controlled models and prompt comparison studies.
- Familiarity with the .NET\+Linux ecosystem.
- Able to read DB schema changes \& migrations (EF Core/.NET, DDL).
Sustainment offers a competitive benefits package for full time employees including medical, dental, vision, paid time off, company holidays, and 401K matching.
Sustainment is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class.
Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
Sustainment participates in E\-Verify.
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 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Sustainment, 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 $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
Sustainment AI Hiring
Sustainment has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Austin, TX, US.
Location Context
AI roles in Austin pay a median of $214,343 across 143 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 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 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 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). 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 (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) 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 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 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 $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. 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 $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. 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 (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 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
Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence
Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.