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About This Role
Join Tether and Shape the Future of Digital Finance
At Tether, we’re not just building products, we’re pioneering a global financial revolution. Our cutting-edge solutions empower businesses—from exchanges and wallets to payment processors and ATMs—to seamlessly integrate reserve-backed tokens across blockchains. By harnessing the power of blockchain technology, Tether enables you to store, send, and receive digital tokens instantly, securely, and globally, all at a fraction of the cost. Transparency is the bedrock of everything we do, ensuring trust in every transaction.
Innovate with Tether
Tether Finance: Our innovative product suite features the world’s most trusted stablecoin, USDT, relied upon by hundreds of millions worldwide, alongside pioneering digital asset tokenization services.
But that’s just the beginning:
Tether Power: Driving sustainable growth, our energy solutions optimize excess power for Bitcoin mining using eco-friendly practices in state-of-the-art, geo-diverse facilities.
Tether Data: Fueling breakthroughs in AI and peer-to-peer technology, we reduce infrastructure costs and enhance global communications with cutting-edge solutions like KEET, our flagship app that redefines secure and private data sharing.
Tether Education: Democratizing access to top-tier digital learning, we empower individuals to thrive in the digital and gig economies, driving global growth and opportunity.
Tether Evolution: At the intersection of technology and human potential, we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible, crafting a future where innovation and human capabilities merge in powerful, unprecedented ways.
Why Join Us?
Our team is a global talent powerhouse, working remotely from every corner of the world. If you’re passionate about making a mark in the fintech space, this is your opportunity to collaborate with some of the brightest minds, pushing boundaries and setting new standards. We’ve grown fast, stayed lean, and secured our place as a leader in the industry.
If you have excellent English communication skills and are ready to contribute to the most innovative platform on the planet, Tether is the place for you.
Are you ready to be part of the future?
About the job
We are seeking a highly driven Head of AI Expansion to lead the global adoption of Tether’s AI ecosystem, with a focus on QVAC and decentralized, privacy-preserving AI infrastructure.
The role will engage leading enterprises, institutions, and governments globally, helping them deploy AI solutions built around local computing, data sovereignty, privacy, and independence from centralized cloud infrastructure.
This is a hands-on leadership role combining exceptional commercial and relationship-building capabilities with deep AI knowledge. You will identify and prioritize opportunities, structure complex projects, close strategic partnerships, monitor success of partnerships and build the team required to scale Tether AI globally.
The ideal candidate can comfortably move between technical discussions with AI and engineering teams and strategic conversations with CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, and government leaders and should be used to work in multiple geographies/ cultures.
International travel is required.
Responsibilities
Business Development & Partnerships
- Drive global adoption of QVAC and Tether AI across enterprises, institutions, and governments.
- Identify organizations where local, private, decentralized, or sovereign AI provides a strategic advantage.
- Match use cases with needs of identified organizations and build business cases for the implementation of the use case
- Nurture existing and build new relationships with CEOs, CTOs, CIOs, AI leaders, and government stakeholders.
- Personally originate, structure, negotiate, and close strategic AI partnerships and deployments.
- Develop partnerships across the AI ecosystem, including compute, hardware, infrastructure, and technology providers.
- Monitor performance of partnerships, proactively identify risks and design mitigation plans
Market Strategy & Execution
- Define and execute Tether AI’s global go-to-market strategy.
- Identify priority markets, industries, and high-value AI use cases.
- Co-develop with clients their requirements and translate them into deployable solutions together with product and engineering teams.
- Build and manage a global pipeline of strategic AI opportunities.
- Monitor market, competitive, regulatory, and technological developments.
Team Leadership
- Build and lead the AI Expansion team globally.
- Recruit expansion managers, partnership leads, solution architects, and other key profiles.
- Establish KPIs, execution playbooks, and commercial processes.
- Work closely with Tether’s AI, engineering, product, and regional Expansion teams.
Strategic Representation
- Position Tether as a strategic partner for organizations seeking AI sovereignty, privacy, resilience, and infrastructure independence.
- Represent Tether AI in strategic meetings, government engagements, conferences, and industry forums.
You Have
- 7+ years of experience across AI, enterprise technology, infrastructure, or technology business development.
- Strong knowledge of AI/ML, LLMs, inference, local/edge computing, data infrastructure, and decentralized architectures.
- Proven experience personally originating, structuring, and closing large enterprise technology deals and partnerships.
- Strong relationships with senior decision-makers across enterprises, technology companies, and/or governments.
- Exceptional communication, negotiation, and relationship-building skills.
- Experience building and managing high-performing teams.
- Entrepreneurial mindset and ability to operate independently in fast-moving environments.
- Degree in AI, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or related field.
Important information for candidates
Recruitment scams have become increasingly common. To protect yourself, please keep the following in mind when applying for roles:
- Apply only through our official channels. We do not use third-party platforms or agencies for recruitment unless clearly stated. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: https://tether.recruitee.com/
- Verify the recruiter’s identity. All our recruiters have verified LinkedIn profiles. If you’re unsure, you can confirm their identity by checking their profile or contacting us through our website.
- Be cautious of unusual communication methods. We do not conduct interviews over WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS. All communication is done through official company emails and platforms.
- Double-check email addresses. All communication from us will come from emails ending in @tether.to or @tether.io
- We will never request payment or financial details. If someone asks for personal financial information or payment at any point during the hiring process, it is a scam. Please report it immediately.
When in doubt, feel free to reach out through our official website.
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 Tether Operations Limited, 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.
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.
Tether Operations Limited AI Hiring
Tether Operations Limited has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in San Francisco, CA, US.
Location Context
AI roles in San Francisco pay a median of $261,000 across 2,646 tracked positions. That's 23% 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 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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