Senior AI / ML Engineer (Remote Contract)

About the role

A single contributor, full-time remote position serving as the primary technical resource for production generative AI and machine learning operations. The role combines LLM gateway and retrieval support with model deployment, inference, evaluation and pipeline operations, and covers incident response, monitoring, release controls and automation. It is a 12+ month contract paid $70 to $80 per hour (W2), open to U.S. citizens, GC holders or those authorized to work in the U.S.

Key responsibilities

• Provide Level 2/Level 3 support through ServiceNow, assess business impact, coordinate recovery and escalation, and document root causes, workarounds and corrective actions.
• Troubleshoot LLM gateways and provider integrations, including authentication, quotas, rate limits, routing, timeouts, retries and fallback behavior.
• Operate RAG and search workflows, investigate indexing failures, stale knowledge, embeddings, filtering and relevance issues in Azure AI Search and connected data pipelines.
• Support Databricks model, processing and evaluation jobs and batch or online inference, investigating runtime failures, schema changes, data freshness and scoring errors.
• Maintain evaluation datasets and automated checks for retrieval relevance, groundedness, response safety and model quality; monitor drift and regressions and coordinate retraining or model changes.
• Monitor availability, latency, errors, throughput, token usage/cost, job success and output freshness, correlating logs, metrics and traces.
• Version code, prompts, configurations and model artifacts, and maintain reproducible environments, automated tests and controlled release, promotion and rollback procedures using Git and CI/CD.
• Automate repeatable checks and recovery tasks, maintain runbooks, dependency maps and escalation paths, and apply access controls, secret handling and AI safety practices.

Required profile

• Demonstrated production support or engineering experience across generative AI services and machine learning pipelines, including incident response, deployments, monitoring and recovery.
• Ability to explain direct contributions and operational outcomes in each area.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise LLM API integration, RAG, embeddings, vector or hybrid search and retrieval filtering.
• Hands-on Databricks or comparable ML platform experience, including job diagnostics, model versioning, batch or online inference, evaluation and rollback.
• Experience diagnosing REST APIs, authentication and service-to-service failures, and with Git, CI/CD, automated testing and controlled releases.
• Working knowledge of containers, Kubernetes diagnostics and cloud service dependencies.
• Ability to prioritize a shared incident and improvement backlog, document procedures and train backup resources.
• A relevant degree or equivalent professional experience.

Required skills

• Strong Python and SQL
• Preferred: Azure Foundry/Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Databricks, Snowflake, AKS, Azure Blob, Azure DevOps, Terraform, MLflow, Redis, Couchbase, Oracle, distributed tracing, Model Context Protocol, computer vision and OCR
• Beneficial: ServiceNow and ITIL-aligned incident, problem and change practices

What we offer

• $70 to $80 per hour (W2) for a 12+ month contract
• Flexible remote and hybrid work opportunities
• Continuous learning and professional development programs