Senior AI/ML Engineer

Velir is an established mid-sized agency with a top-tier portfolio of clients, ranging from the world’s largest non-profits to Fortune 500 brands. As of 2023, Velir acquired Brooklyn Data Company, a premier data and analytics consultancy focused on leadership, process improvement, implementation, and advanced analytics.

At Velir , we believe people are our greatest asset. Our culture is built on a foundation of trust, collaboration, and continued improvement. We strive for excellence in everything we do, embracing challenges as opportunities for growth. Our success is driven by a shared passion for making a positive impact on our customers, our communities and each other. We are a remote first company that offers competitive pay and excellent benefits.

Overview

Senior AI/ML Engineers are senior individual contributors who design, build, and deploy production-grade AI/ML systems for both client-facing and internal products. They partner with leadership and cross-functional teams to translate business needs into scalable ML and LLM-based solutions.

This role does not typically include direct reports but requires strong technical leadership, mentorship, and influence across teams.
Responsibilities
AI/ML System Design & Leadership

- Lead the design and implementation of scalable ML systems, including supervised, unsupervised, and LLM-based solutions

- Translate research and prototypes into production-ready systems

- Partner with stakeholders to identify high-impact AI/ML opportunities and define optimal technical approaches

- Provide technical mentorship and contribute to team upskilling

LLM & Production AI Systems

- Build and operate LLM pipelines, including prompt design, fine-tuning, and evaluation

- Develop RAG-based systems using embeddings, vector stores, and retrieval strategies

- Design evaluation frameworks, feedback loops, and datasets to continuously improve model performance

- Create reusable tooling to accelerate experimentation, deployment, and monitoring

MLOps & Deployment

- Own end-to-end ML lifecycle: data pipelines, training, deployment, monitoring, and iteration

- Establish best practices for reproducibility, observability, CI/CD, and model versioning

- Partner with platform/DevOps teams to ensure reliability and scalability

- Promote responsible AI practices, including governance, fairness, and transparency

Cross-Functional Collaboration

- Lead cross-functional initiatives across data engineering, analytics, and AI/ML

- Translate complex ML concepts into clear recommendations for technical and non-technical audiences

- Collaborate with clients and internal teams to plan and deliver AI/ML solutions

- Contribute documentation, frameworks, and shared best practices

Project Execution

- Scope and lead complex AI/ML initiatives aligned to business outcomes

- Align stakeholders and drive execution across teams

- Establish clear success metrics and ensure delivery of high-impact solutions

Skills & Qualifications

- 5–7 years of experience in ML engineering, AI engineering, or related fields, with production deployment experience

- Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience with PyTorch and HuggingFace

- Experience building LLM applications, including RAG, embeddings, and vector search

- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure; e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock, Azure ML)

- Strong understanding of ML fundamentals: data design, training, evaluation, and experimentation

- Familiarity with LLM alignment techniques (e.g., SFT, DPO, RL)

- Experience with MLOps practices: CI/CD, monitoring, retraining, and experiment tracking

- Proficiency working with complex, multi-source datasets and defining evaluation strategies

- Strong software engineering fundamentals (testing, modularity, code review)

- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction

- Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Tech Stack

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Languages