AI Integration Specialist

LeClaire Manufacturing Co•Bettendorf, IA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

LeClaire Manufacturing is an aluminum foundry producing sand and permanent mold castings for some of the most demanding customers in North America. We've been building parts the right way for decades — and now we're building the future of how we do it. We're looking for someone who sits at the intersection of manufacturing know-how and modern AI tooling. This isn't an IT role. It isn't a pure data science role either. It's something newer: a builder who understands what it means to run a production floor, and who can translate that understanding into AI-powered tools that make our teams faster, smarter, and more effective every day. You'll start by using AI to help schedule our departments, analyze job cost data, surface scrap trends, and answer operational questions that used to take hours to pull manually. Then you'll grow that into something bigger: a connected ecosystem of AI platforms that touches every corner of our operation.

Requirements

Grew up curious about how things work — machines, processes, systems
Taught yourself to code or use data tools because you needed them to answer a question, not because it was assigned
Has spent time in or around manufacturing, engineering, operations, or supply chain — you know what a job traveler is, you understand why on-time delivery matters, and you don't need a glossary to follow a conversation about scrap rates
Gets genuinely excited about connecting a live database to a language model and watching it answer a question a manager has been manually calculating for years
Communicates clearly with people who aren't technical, and isn't condescending about it
Working with AI APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, or similar) — prompt engineering, tool use / function calling, agentic workflows
Python or JavaScript for building data pipelines and applications
SQL — able to write queries against real production databases without hand-holding
Connecting to REST APIs and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers

Nice To Haves

Experience with ERP systems, especially Epicor
Familiarity with manufacturing execution systems or SCADA / Ignition environments
Excel and spreadsheet automation
Basic understanding of foundry or machining operations

Responsibilities

Build and maintain AI-assisted scheduling workflows for our manufacturing departments — pulling from job cost data, production history, machine capacity, and operator assignments to generate weekly schedules that reflect what's actually achievable
Develop conversational AI tools connected to our live data systems (job cost, scrap tracking, maintenance, inspection, labor, process monitoring) so supervisors and managers can ask plain-English questions and get real answers
Create dashboards and automated analyses that surface anomalies, highlight at-risk jobs, and flag where we're running behind or ahead on rate
Architect and deploy additional AI platforms across departments — quality, maintenance, purchasing, quoting, and wherever the data and the need align
Connect our existing systems (Epicor ERP, Thrive, Ignition/PaperlessLog, monday.com) into a unified AI layer that can reason across them together
Build internal tools that non-technical users can actually use — not demos that live in a notebook, but real applications that get used every day
Document your builds and train the people who'll rely on them
Stay current on where AI tooling is heading and bring new capabilities to LeClaire before our competitors do

Benefits

Competitive salary commensurate with experience
Full benefits including Health, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability and Supplemental Insurance: Critical Illness, Accident and Hospital Indemnity
401(k) with employer match
Paid time off and paid holidays

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