AI Engineer

Job Role: AI Engineer

Location: Austin, TX (Onsite – 4–5 days/week)

Duration: 12-Month Contract

This role is part of TxDOT’s Traffic Technology group, focused on building safety-driven AI solutions to improve roadway operations across Texas. The position emphasizes applied AI, particularly in computer vision, video analytics, and scalable AI pipelines used in real operational environments.

Responsibilities

(Including but not limited to)

•         Collaborate with business stakeholders to gather, analyze, and document AI solution requirements.

•         Develop AI/ML proof-of-concept solutions and transition successful prototypes into production systems.

•         Design, build, and maintain scalable AI/ML pipelines that integrate with enterprise workflows.

•         Train, fine-tune, validate, and optimize AI/ML models for performance and reliability.

•         Develop clean, efficient, and well-documented code to support AI workflows.

•         Conduct rigorous testing, validation, and quality assurance of AI models and outputs.

•         Ensure all solutions comply with TxDOT IT governance, security, and audit standards.

•         Act as a liaison between Traffic Technology, ITD AI teams, TRF, and other stakeholders.

•         Communicate project progress, risks, and outcomes to leadership and project sponsors.

•         Support reusable AI components, standardized practices, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Required Qualifications

•         3+ years of production-level Python experience.

•         3+ years of hands-on AI/ML production experience delivering models used by real users.

•         Experience deploying and managing ML workloads on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or OCI).

•         Strong DevOps experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

•         Experience with SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL/vector databases.

•         Proficiency in scripting using Bash and PowerShell.

•         Strong command-line (CLI) experience in production environments.

•         Local to Austin, TX and willing to work onsite.

Preferred Qualifications

•         Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.).

•         Production experience in computer vision (PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenCV, object detection, segmentation, real-time inference).

•         Experience with Go or Rust for performance-critical components.

•         Knowledge of feature stores, advanced feature engineering, and model optimization techniques (quantization, pruning, distillation).

•         Experience with edge deployment or resource-constrained environments.

•         Familiarity with A/B testing frameworks for ML models.

•         Contributions to open-source ML projects.

•         Experience with real-time streaming platforms such as Kafka or Kinesis.