Senior AI Engineer
About The Position
Abacus Insights is seeking a hands-on senior AI engineer to lead technical direction for projects and help shape the company’s applied AI areas and intelligence features. The role involves initiating projects, personally designing systems and architecture, and coordinating with data quality, platform, DevOps, product, and business teams to deliver production systems. The engineer will bridge technical capabilities and business needs, advise stakeholders on feasibility, and keep technical decisions grounded in business priorities. The position combines technical leadership and mentorship with substantial individual contribution. It includes developing data collection, fine-tuning, and LLM techniques; designing machine-learning and AI pipelines; building scalable backend systems for generative AI products; and establishing logging, telemetry, and evaluation practices. The engineer will contribute to architectural decisions, support Agile/Scrum improvements, balance roadmap delivery with client escalations, and participate in customer-facing technical discussions.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of ML/AI engineering experience in high-velocity, high-growth companies, or equivalent ML/AI research experience in academia, within at least 8 years of overall software development experience.
- Track record leading software development teams or projects delivering production-grade systems for real customers.
- Experience mentoring and growing engineers, setting technical direction, delegating effectively, and serving as a trusted technical resource.
- Strong experience with language modeling and GenAI, including generative and embedding techniques, modern model architectures, fine-tuning or pre-training datasets, evaluation benchmarks, RAG, and SQL agents.
- Strong hands-on experience in at least one of agents/agentic workflows, MCP, or RAG, with working exposure to all three.
- Proficiency in Python, TensorFlow or PyTorch, and scalable ML/AI architecture.
- Ability to drive end-to-end model and system development from research and prototyping through deployment and monitoring.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, code review, deployment practices, QA, test automation, and Agile methodologies.
- Experience designing scalable distributed systems for data-processing applications at the tens-to-hundreds-of-terabytes scale.
- Knowledge of cloud architecture, AI architecture, agentic systems, MPP compute frameworks for Data+AI platforms, security, and MCP/API-based services.
- Ability to contribute to technical discussions with internal and external stakeholders and influence outcomes.
- Understanding of adjacent functions such as product management, project management, client delivery, and operations, with the ability to work effectively across them.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and an interest in improving AI-driven user experiences.
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant professional experience.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with Databricks and Mosaic AI Gateway.
- Experience with Snowflake.
- Familiarity with FHIR.
- Exposure to healthcare data.
- Prior experience as an engineering tech lead, team lead, or people manager.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the senior-most technical voice on assigned projects and translate roadmap and customer priorities into technical direction.
- Act as a liaison between technical teams and business or product stakeholders, explaining technical feasibility and implementation realities.
- Shape applied AI areas and intelligence features, including deployment of state-of-the-art AI models and systems for Abacus products and services.
- Develop data collection, fine-tuning, and LLM techniques and design AI/ML pipelines for preprocessing, feature engineering, training, tuning, and evaluation.
- Build scalable, reusable backend systems for company-wide GenAI products, including robust logging, telemetry, and evaluation harnesses.
- Set technical direction for project engineers, review their approaches, and mentor and coach developers while remaining hands-on.
- Participate in architectural discussions and influence technical decisions.
- Identify people and process improvements for Agile/Scrum teams.
- Balance roadmap commitments with interruptions and client escalations, applying incident management, configuration management, and operational-efficiency practices.
- Communicate architecture and implementation objectives upward and keep teams aligned with established policies.
- Represent Abacus in customer-facing technical conversations, especially when stakeholders need guidance on technical feasibility.
Benefits
- Unlimited paid time off.
- Work-from-anywhere flexibility.
- Comprehensive health coverage with multiple plan options.
- Equity for every employee.
- Growth-focused environment.
- One-time home office setup allowance.
- Monthly cell phone allowance.
- Base salary, eligibility for performance bonuses, and equity grants.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
