Senior AI/ML Engineer

Katalyst Data Management • Houston, TX

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Katalyst Data Management (KDM) is seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to help design, build, and operate the infrastructure that powers their 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. The role involves serving as a technical lead for segments of KDM's AI innovation platform, owning architecture and day-to-day development for AI projects that move from prototype to production. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you will work directly with the Director of Innovation and a small, high-velocity team to build, ship, and iterate AI capabilities that deliver real value to leading oil and gas clients worldwide. It requires sound architectural judgment, practical execution, and the ability to deliver production-ready solutions in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

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

• benefits coverage offered to Katalyst employees based on geographical location

What This Job Offers

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