AI / Machine Learning Engineer
Develops, tunes, evaluates, and deploys machine learning models and LLM-powered applications into scalable production environments.
What the role involves
- Design, train, and fine-tune machine learning and deep learning models
- Build end-to-end LLM pipelines utilizing retrieval, embeddings, and vector databases
- Optimize inference latency, memory consumption, and GPU utilization
- Establish automated model evaluation, drift detection, and monitoring
- Deploy containerized ML microservices via REST/gRPC endpoints
Core skills
- Python (level 5/5)
- PyTorch / TensorFlow (level 4/5)
- Machine Learning Fundamentals (level 4/5)
- LLMs & Prompt Engineering (level 4/5)
- Vector DBs & RAG (level 3/5)
- Data Preprocessing & Feature Engineering (level 4/5)
- Git & Linux CLI (level 4/5)
Preferred skills
- Docker & Kubernetes
- MLOps (MLflow, Weights & Biases)
- Cloud AI Services (GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock)
- Model Quantization & Optimization
Tools
Experience expected
2-4 years in Python software engineering with applied machine learning or generative AI projects
Projects that prove the role
- Enterprise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant with source citation
- Multimodal classifier with active learning and automated retraining pipeline
- Fine-tuned open-source model optimized for domain-specific medical/legal QA
Evidence to collect
- A model evaluation report showing offline metrics and online results
- A deployed inference endpoint with documented latency
- A written comparison of approaches you ran
What the interview covers
- Bias-variance tradeoff, regularization, and gradient descent mechanics
- Attention mechanism, Transformer architecture, and tokenization
- Evaluating generative outputs: hallucination mitigation and retrieval metrics
- Serving ML models at scale with low latency and batching
How the role progresses
- Associate ML Engineer
- AI/ML Engineer
- Senior AI Engineer
- Staff ML Scientist
- Head of AI
Certifications that carry weight
- DeepLearning.AI Machine Learning Specialization
- Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer
Related roles
- data-scientist
- fullstack-engineer
- software-engineer
Turn this into a plan
Inside CareerDev4AI, choosing this role generates a roadmap of the skills, projects and milestones that move you towards it.