Principal AI Engineer

Salary: $120,000 to $140,000 per annum
Job Summary

• We are seeking a senior level AI/ML engineering contractor to temporarily step into a technical leadership and team lead role supporting personalization models and the company’s AI platform.
• The ideal candidate can balance technical expertise, strategic decision making, and day to day team guidance to ensure continuity during the leave period.

Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership for Personalization Models:

• Lead team performing development, improvement, and rollout of machine learning models that power personalized content, offers, and product recommendations.
• Advise on model testing and experimentation, ensuring that new versions are evaluated properly before rollout.
• Manage model performance, reliability, and response time improvements.

AI Platform Stewardship

• Drive enhancements to shared AI infrastructure, including data pipelines, model serving interfaces, monitoring, and observability.
• Ensure engineering standards and best practices are followed across teams using the platform.
• Partner with data engineering, product, and business teams to align platform capabilities with strategic needs.

Team & Program Leadership

• Provide technical direction to engineers and data scientists working across recommendation and personalization initiatives.
• Maintain clear documentation and organize technical materials to keep ongoing work unblocked.
• Coordinate cross functional planning, ensuring teams have clarity on goals, priorities, and dependencies.

Strategic Planning & Delivery Management

• Make informed trade off decisions balancing speed, accuracy, reliability, and business value.
• Ensure work continues to move forward smoothly in areas such as model upgrades, new placements, and user facing improvements.
• Guide team in adopting AI solutions to accelerate SDLC

Required Skills & Experience

• Senior level experience building and operating machine learning systems in production.
• Strong understanding of ranking models, recommendation systems, model evaluation, and experiment design.
• Hands on expertise with modern AI/ML engineering tools (e.g., Python, Spark or similar, cloud-based ML pipelines, cloud model serving frameworks, and API design).
• Ability to lead engineering discussions, guide team members, and provide clear direction.
• Strong organizational skills: able to manage complex projects and maintain structure during a temporary leadership period.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical details into clear action for partners and stakeholders.