Senior AI/ML Engineer

Katalyst Data Management • Houston, TX

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Join the dynamic and collaborative team at Katalyst Data Management (KDM)! KDM is seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to help design, build, and operate the infrastructure that powers our next generation of AI-enabled data solutions. This is an exciting opportunity for a hands-on technical leader who can scale production AI/ML systems, optimize GPU and cloud environments, and deliver reliable, secure platforms that support innovation for global energy clients. Qualified candidates will bring strong engineering judgment, practical AI/ML deployment experience, and the ability to turn complex technical requirements into production-ready solutions. Position Located in Houston, TX USA; Calgary, AB Canada; or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday Full-Time position Hybrid Schedule Availability The Company Katalyst Data Management (KDM) is a global leader in subsurface data management solutions for the energy industry. For over 30 years, we have helped oil and gas companies, national governments, and energy organizations maximize the value of their data through secure storage, quality management, digital delivery, and online data marketing services. Our industry-leading iGlass™ platform provides customers with reliable, secure, 24/7 access to critical subsurface information, supported by robust system redundancy and data protection controls. Through innovation, technical expertise, and exceptional customer service, KDM continues to deliver trusted solutions to clients around the world.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years building and operating ML/AI-enabled applications in production.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting end-to-end services, including APIs, data pipelines, model integration, observability, deployment, and operations.
• Hands-on experience delivering search or information retrieval features, including full-text search, ranking/relevance, indexing strategy, and performance optimization.
• Experience working in cloud environments and shipping containerized services using CI/CD practices.
• Strong English communication skills, both oral and written, are required.
• Strong programming skills in Python preferred and/or Node.js, including writing clean, testable code and reviewing others’ code.
• Strong SQL and relational database experience, including advanced querying, schema design awareness, full-text search, and performance tuning.
• Experience with search and analytics platforms such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or equivalent.
• Practical experience integrating LLM APIs into applications, including prompting patterns, tool/function calling, basic evaluation, and production guardrails.
• Comfort working with modern AI development workflows, including agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.
• Working knowledge of cloud services and security fundamentals, including IAM concepts, secrets management, and network boundaries.
• Strong English communication skills, both oral and written, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business needs into clear technical plans, trade-offs, and deliverables.

Nice To Haves

• Oil and gas industry experience or domain knowledge, including well data, seismic data, or regulatory documents.
• Experience with GPU-accelerated workloads and the NVIDIA ecosystem.
• Background in OCR pipelines and large-scale document processing.
• Familiarity with vision-language models for document understanding.
• Experience with agent-to-agent or multi-agent AI system patterns.
• Patent, publication, or conference presentation experience in ML/AI.

Responsibilities

• Operate, scale, and optimize production GPU environments supporting AI workloads, including inference/model serving, OCR and vision models, embeddings, and large-scale document ingestion.
• Lead the design and implementation of production AI/ML services that support intelligent search, classification, retrieval, and natural language interfaces for subsurface and E&P data.
• Own technical architecture for core platform components, including retrieval systems, orchestration, model serving, and data pipelines, while balancing reliability, cost, security, and delivery speed.
• Build, maintain, and optimize retrieval systems using relational databases, full-text search, and search or analytics platforms such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Develop and maintain RAG-style pipelines, including embeddings, vector search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, grounding, and evaluation against real customer workflows.
• Integrate LLM APIs and agentic tooling into end-to-end applications, including prompt design, tool/function calling, evaluation, and production guardrails.
• Support deployment, observability, alerting, incident response, and CI/CD practices across on-premises and cloud environments.
• Partner with product leaders, business stakeholders, data experts, and domain specialists to translate ambiguous problems into clear technical plans, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards for code review, testing, documentation, design reviews, and operational excellence.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to engineers as the platform evolves.

Benefits

• As a full-time position, the Senior AI/ML Engineer is eligible to participate in benefits coverage offered to Katalyst employees based on geographical location.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior