Chief AI Engineer
About The Position
ODI is looking for a builder who is ready to put AI to work for California. As our Chief AI Engineer, you will lead the technical design and delivery of AI solutions that solve real-world problems. You won’t just be advising; you will be engineering systems that turn foundation models into practical tools, helping state departments move from manual processes to efficient, AI-augmented workflows. This is a hands-on role focused on shipping code that matters. You will use cloud platforms common in state government (like Azure, GCP, AWS, and Snowflake) and bring a "product mindset" to ensure projects evolve from prototypes into reliable daily tools. If you are passionate about writing clean code, solving complex data challenges, and mentoring others in responsible AI engineering, we want you to be the technical heartbeat of our team.
Requirements
- Expert-level Python skills, with a focus on writing production-quality, testable, and maintainable code.
- Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines for machine learning to automate testing and deployment.
- The ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and translate policy requirements into code.
- A proven track record of implementing guardrails, bias detection, and privacy protection in AI systems.
Nice To Haves
- Deep experience building and deploying LLM-backed applications, using techniques like RAG, vector search, or agentic orchestration.
- Advanced proficiency in engineering within major cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure, or Snowflake) and deploying secure cloud infrastructure.
- A "Responsible AI" Mindset
Responsibilities
- Design and deploy intelligent applications that use the right tool for the job—whether that is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), fine-tuning, or other grounding techniques—to ensure results are accurate and context-aware.
- Engineer pipelines that take unstructured documents and turn them into structured, useful data.
- Create autonomous workflows that can retrieve information and assist humans with complex analysis, all while keeping safety guardrails in place.
- Act as the technical conscience of the team, ensuring every system we build is ethical, secure, unbiased, and privacy-first.
- Take "proof of concepts" and turn them into monitored production services using modern DevOps and MLOps practices.
- Run workshops, mentor data professionals, and help upskill the state workforce on the latest AI engineering practices.
Benefits
- telework opportunities in accordance with agency telework policies
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
