AI Engineer

Role: AI Engineer

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California

We are seeking a seniorlevel AI/ML engineering contractor to temporarily step into a technical leadership and teamlead role supporting personalization models and the company s AI platform. The ideal candidate can balance technical expertise, strategic decisionmaking, and daytoday team guidance to ensure continuity during the leave period.

Key Responsibilities
1. Technical Leadership for Personalization Models
Lead team performing development, improvement, and rollout of machinelearning 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 responsetime improvements.
2. AI Platform Stewardship
Drive enhancements to shared AI infrastructure, including data pipelines, modelserving 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.
3. 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 crossfunctional planning, ensuring teams have clarity on goals, priorities, and dependencies.
4. Strategic Planning & Delivery Management
Make informed tradeoff decisions balancing speed, accuracy, reliability, and business value.
Ensure work continues to move forward smoothly in areas such as model upgrades, new placements, and userfacing improvements.
Guide team in adopting AI solutions to accelerate SDLC
Required Skills & Experience
Seniorlevel experience building and operating machinelearning systems in production.
Strong understanding of ranking models, recommendation systems, model evaluation, and experiment design.
Handson expertise with modern AI/ML engineering tools (e.g., Python, Spark or similar, cloudbased ML pipelines, cloud modelserving 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.