Machine Learning Engineer | Contract | Remote

Remote Mid Level AI/ML Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AnthropicAwsAzureDockerEmbeddingsFaissGcpHugging FaceLangchainLlamaindex

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

About us:

Working at Tech Holding isn't just a job, it's an opportunity to be a part of something bigger. We are a full-service consulting firm that was founded on the premise of delivering predictable outcomes and high-quality solutions to our clients. Our founders and team members have industry experience and have held senior positions in a wide variety of companies – from emerging startups to large Fortune 50 firms – and we have taken our combined experiences and developed a unique approach that is supported by the principles of deep expertise, integrity, transparency, and dependability.

The Role:

We're looking for a hands-on Machine Learning Engineer, for a project based assignment, to help build an AI-powered risk intelligence platform. The platform helps enterprises detect, assess, and respond to emerging online threats, including disinformation, reputational attacks, and security risks. You'll design, build, and deploy NLP and LLM-based models that process large volumes of data from mainstream and niche online sources. Your work will feed directly into the signals customers act on. This is an individual-contributor role working closely with data engineers, backend engineers, and product stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Design, train, and deploy ML models for text classification, entity extraction, clustering, and narrative and topic detection
  • Build and improve LLM-powered features, including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic workflows
  • Develop embedding and semantic-search pipelines to group related content and surface emerging threats
  • Productionize models as scalable, monitored services with clear latency, cost, and accuracy targets
  • Build evaluation frameworks and datasets to measure model quality, bias, and drift over time
  • Work with data engineering to improve ingestion, labeling, and feature pipelines for high-volume, noisy, multilingual text data
  • Monitor and retrain models in production, and debug quality issues end to end
  • Document approaches and share trade-offs clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Requirements:

  • 4+ years of professional experience building and deploying machine learning models in production
  • Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Hugging Face Transformers
  • Practical NLP experience, such as classification, named entity recognition (NER), topic modeling, or semantic similarity on real-world text data
  • Hands-on experience building with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models), including prompt engineering and RAG
  • Experience with embeddings and vector search (e.g., pgvector, Pinecone, OpenSearch, or FAISS)
  • Experience deploying and operating ML services on AWS, GCP, or Azure, using Docker and CI/CD
  • Solid grasp of model evaluation, including metrics, test sets, error analysis, and production monitoring
  • Strong communication skills and comfort working in a remote, cross-functional team

Nice to have:

  • Experience with trust and safety, threat intelligence, disinformation research, or social media data
  • Experience building agentic AI systems or tool-using LLM workflows (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom frameworks)
  • Experience with multilingual NLP
  • Familiarity with MLOps tooling such as MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, or Weights & Biases
  • Experience with streaming or large-scale data processing (e.g., Kafka, Spark, or Airflow)
  • Experience fine-tuning LLMs (LoRA or PEFT) or distilling models to cut cost and latency

Location:

  • Remote, USA

Time Zone:

  • Must work overlapping hours with US Eastern Time

Employment type:

  • Contract
  • 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

#LI-Remote

Tech Holding is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and experiences, and we consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. If you require accommodation in the application process, please contact our HR

Role Details

Company Tech Holding
Title Machine Learning Engineer | Contract | Remote
Location Dallas, TX, US
Category AI/ML Engineer
Experience Mid Level
Salary Not disclosed
Remote Yes

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 Tech Holding, 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

Anthropic (2% of roles) Aws (10% of roles) Azure (8% of roles) Docker (4% of roles) Embeddings (2% of roles) Faiss Gcp (6% of roles) Hugging Face (1% of roles) Langchain (3% of roles) Llamaindex (1% of roles)

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.

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.

Tech Holding AI Hiring

Tech Holding has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Dallas, TX, US.

Remote Work Context

Remote AI roles pay a median of $188,000 across 2,316 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.

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

Based on 13,048 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI/ML Engineer positions is $211,950. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
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.
About 6% of the 9,079 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Tech Holding is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI/ML Engineer positions include ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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