Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at The Village Company?
Apply Now →About This Role
The Village Company, headquartered in Eden Prairie, MN, creates bath, shower, hair, and body care products for the whole family under America's favorite brands.
We are currently seeking an Associate Marketing Manager to join our team. This role will report to our Chief Marketing Officer and will play a key role in supporting product development, brand execution, digital content management, and cross-functional communication across the organization. This position ensures that new and existing products move smoothly through testing, regulatory review, creative development, and retailer setup, while also helping to manage social media activity, consumer engagement, promotional planning, and event execution. This associate marketing manager role is ideal for a detail-oriented marketer who thrives in a fast-paced CPG environment and enjoys balancing both analytical and creative work.
Key Responsibilities
Social Media and Consumer Engagement
- Manage social media posting, moderation, listening, and engagement across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
- Support cross-channel strategy and messaging alignment with the e-commerce team.
- Develop and coordinate content for consumer touchpoints, including the Soap and Dish newsletter.
Product and Regulatory Support
- Conduct initial product testing, especially when transitioning existing items to new manufacturing facilities.
- Generate and maintain part numbers and UPCs for new and existing products.
- Submit products to regulatory agencies for review and manage initial feedback assessments.
- Support ingredient, dye, and materials updates for Foam Soap and other product lines, including artwork and documentation revisions.
- Collect and analyze competitive pricing to support new product development (NPD) initiatives.
- Prepare and submit new product artwork to IRI/Nielsen.
- Complete new item setup paperwork for inline items, special promotions, and programs such as Target Bullseye.
Artwork, Packaging, and Content Management
- Maintain the art transition document and ensure accurate, up-to-date tracking of artwork changes.
- Collaborate with the creative team to request image assets as needed.
- Manage online content across digital platforms, including product images, copy updates, country-of-origin (COO) changes, and compliance adjustments.
- Manage content and data syndication through Syndigo.
- Perform weekly audits of images and content on major retailer websites, addressing inconsistencies or errors proactively
- Troubleshoot and resolve content or compliance issues on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, and other retailerplatforms.
Promotional Planning and Brand Activation
- Update and manage the digital promotional calendar to ensure alignment across internal teams.
- Assist with planning and executing brand activations and events, including:
+ 3M Open
+ Mr. Bubble's 65th Birthday activations
+ Community and partnership events
+ Support limited-edition product launches, including kickoff meetings, label content development, and cross-functional coordination.
Financial and Administrative Support
- Update monthly consumer marketing spend and ensure accurate financial tracking.
- Provide general project management support to ensure timelines, deliverables, and cross department communication remain on track.
Business Insights and Sales Support
- Analyze market trends, category shifts, and competitive activity to help inform product updates, pricing strategy, and promotional planning.
- Support the sales team by refreshing and enhancing sales presentations, sell-in decks, and customer-facing materials
- Create, update, and distribute sales mockups to internal teams and external retail partners as needed.
- Provide insights and data that strengthen retailer pitches, new item submissions, and promotional sell-in conversations.
- Collaborate with Sales and Marketing leadership to ensure that insights, visuals, and messaging are aligned across channels and customer accounts.
Other Business Needs
- Support cross-functional teams with ad-hoc marketing requests, research needs, or documentation updates as business priorities evolve.
- Assist in process improvements to enhance efficiency across product development, regulatory workflows, and
marketing operations.
- Participate in internal meetings, brainstorming sessions, and strategic planning discussions as needed.
- Provide additional administrative or coordination support during peak workload periods, seasonal promotions, or brand initiatives.
- Step in to support team members' responsibilities during absences, high-volume project cycles, or urgent market demands.
- Maintain flexibility to take on emerging responsibilities that align with brand growth, organizational needs, or evolving market conditions.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Business, Communications, or related field preferred.
- 3-4 years of marketing experience, ideally within CPG, retail, or a similar environment.
- Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Comfortable working cross-functionally with regulatory, creative, supply chain, and e-commerce teams.
- Detail-oriented with strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
- Proficiency in Microsoft Office
- Experience with Amazon, Shopify, Walmart Marketplace, TikTok, Google, and Meta is a plus.
- Success Looks Like
+ Consistent accuracy in product setup, regulatory submissions, and content management.
+ Smooth execution of promotions, limited-edition launches, and retail updates.
+ Proactive identification and resolution of online content issues.
+ Strong collaboration with marketing, creative, e-commerce, and regulatory partners.
+ Increased social media engagement and improved consumer connection across channels.
On-site Work Requirement
- The Village Company has a company-wide hybrid work requirement. The team is on-site at our headquarters on Tuesday and Wednesday each week and can work from home for the remaining three days.
The Village Company is committed to diversity, inclusion, and accessibility and is an equal-opportunity employer.
Copyright TVC LLC
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 37,339 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At The Village Company, 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 in Demand for This Role
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 $154,000 based on 8,743 positions with disclosed compensation. Entry-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $85,000.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $85,000; Mid: $147,000; Senior: $225,000; Director: $230,600; VP: $248,357.
The Village Company AI Hiring
The Village Company has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Eden Prairie, MN, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 7% (2,732 positions) offer remote work, while 34,484 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,633 roles, $204,100 median); Los Angeles (1,356 roles, $179,440 median); San Francisco (1,230 roles, $240,000 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 37,339 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 3,672 entry-level, 23,272 mid-level, 7,048 senior, and 3,347 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (2,732 positions). The remaining 34,484 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 21 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 24 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 264 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 37,339 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (33,926), AI Software Engineer (823), AI Product Manager (805). 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 (3,672) are outnumbered by mid-level (23,272) and senior (7,048) 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 3,347 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (2,732 positions), with 34,484 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 $190,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $300,688. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,600. 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: Rag (23,721 postings), Aws (12,486 postings), Rust (10,785 postings), Python (5,564 postings), Azure (3,616 postings), Gcp (3,032 postings), Prompt Engineering (2,112 postings), Kubernetes (1,713 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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