Senior AI Engineer & Strategist

• Location: Chesterfield, MO

• Remote: Remote
• Type: Contract
• Job #46967

Technology Partners is currently seeking a talented Senior AI Engineer and Advisor. Do you have experience building production AI applications and leading AI engineering teams using LLMs, APIs, and modern ML frameworks? Let us help you make your next big career move a reality! What You Will Be Doing You will serve as the senior technical voice within the client’s AI practice, leading the development of production-grade AI applications that directly address client use cases. You will partner closely with client engineers, building scalable, reliable, and explainable AI solutions involving both large language models (LLMs) and traditional machine learning. You will review and shape architecture choices related to model selection, retrieval mechanisms, prompt engineering, and deployment strategies, ensuring operational excellence. Additionally, you will lead and mentor the client’s existing AI engineers, elevating their skills through hands-on collaboration, code reviews, and strategic guidance. Balancing delivery with advisory responsibilities, you will review the client’s AI roadmap, identify capability gaps, and develop prioritized recommendations for both immediate and long-term growth. Your influence will extend across containerization, CI/CD pipelines, security postures, model governance, and MLOps/LLMOps practices to enable the client’s AI systems to evolve securely and efficiently.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and ship production AI applications utilizing LLMs and traditional ML models, tailored to client needs.
• Make and defend architectural decisions including model type, retrieval architecture, prompt engineering, and fallback strategies.
• Develop application layers around models, including APIs, integrations, UIs, and observability components.
• Lead by example as the technical mentor and reviewer for the client’s AI engineering team, fostering skill growth and best practices.
• Review and improve the client's AI roadmap, producing a comprehensive gap analysis and actionable recommendations.
• Define and implement containerization strategies, build pipelines, and deployment patterns for AI workloads.
• Establish security protocols including secrets management, output filtering, and model access controls.
• Design and oversee ML operations including evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, and feedback loops.
• Develop governance structures such as model registries, decision logs, and compliance documentation aligned with industry standards.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years focused on building and deploying AI/ML systems in production environments.
• Deep hands-on expertise developing LLM-based applications, including RAG, agentic patterns, structured generation, and prompt engineering.
• Practical familiarity with proprietary APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), open-weight models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen), vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Experience working with traditional ML models such as gradient-boosted trees and recommendation systems.
• Strong evaluation discipline, with examples of offline benchmarking, human-in-the-loop evaluation, and online metrics.
• Extensive MLOps and LLMOps experience, including CI/CD pipelines, model registries, and deployment patterns for AI systems.
• Expertise in containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and AI-specific security practices.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise security standards, data classification, and governance in complex environments.
• Proven leadership managing engineering teams, coaching talent, and delivering strategic roadmaps.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience creating architecture documents, strategic reports, and client presentations.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (Master’s preferred).

Desired Skills & Experience

• Experience working within retail, e-commerce, or consumer industries on product recommendation or customer-facing AI solutions.
• Multi-cloud experience spanning at least two major cloud providers.
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or technical thought leadership such as blogs or conference talks.
• Previous experience establishing an AI center of excellence or AI practice from inception.
• Knowledge of traditional data engineering tools like SQL, Spark, and data pipelines.
• Active engagement with responsible AI, fairness, and safety initiatives.
• Prior consulting or advisory experience at a top-tier firm or Big 4.

Pay: $84.00 – $120.00 /hr Keywords: AI engineering, LLM, MLOps, prompt engineering, AI leadership, containerization, cloud AI, model governance, enterprise security, retail AI We are interested in every qualified candidate who is eligible to work in the United States. However, we are not able to provide sponsorship at this time or accept candidates who would require a corp-to-corp agreement. If this position sounds like you, WE SHOULD TALK! Your better future is ready, and we want to put the right tools in your hands to get you there. Let's go! Looking for more opportunities with Technology Partners? Check out technologypartners.net/jobs! All offers of employment at Technology Partners are contingent upon clear results of a thorough background check and drug screening that meet corresponding laws and regulations at the city, state and federal level. Pay ranges are influenced by candidate qualifications, experience, and role specifics, with the actual rate determined considering skills, market conditions, and are subject to change by the employer; pay negotiations follow all state and federal legal guidelines.

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