Sr. AIML Engineer

Job Title: Sr. AI/ML Engineer

Location: Frisco TX or Bellevue WA

Duration: / Term: Contract to hire

Experience Desired: 10 Years

Job Description:

We are looking for a Senior AI Consultant to serve as a strategic advisor and technical architect for our AI transformation programme. The engagement spans multiple high-impact use cases in Telco Ops along with a broader model selection and cost-governance framework. You will play a thought leadership role guiding senior stakeholders on AI strategy architecture decisions and execution models-bringing both hands-on expertise in GenAI and traditional AI/ML as well as experience advising VP/Sr. Director-level leadership in large enterprises. You will help us make the right decisions on model architecture tooling implementation sequencing and team structure with a specific focus on when to use SLMs vs LLMs and how to build cost-efficient production-grade AI pipelines.

Key Responsibilities

• Advise on architecture decisions for AI use cases involving SLM LLM hybrid AI pipelines across multiple AI tasks like classification information extraction document processing correlation and reasoning workloads.
• Review and challenge model selection choices benchmarking methodology and fine-tuning strategies for different AI tasks tasks
• Guide the cost-versus-accuracy trade-off analysis across model types (frontier LLM LLM with fine-tuning SLM instruct SLM fine-tuned) and workload profiles.
• Provide practical input on implementation approach team structure sprint sequencing and make-vs-buy decisions.
• Review data strategy labelling effort sizing evaluation harness design and MLOps requirements for each workload.
• Advise on how to structure the business case and design the appropriate AI architecture including executive-level cost latency and accuracy comparisons.
• Flag risks including vendor lock-in model drift data governance gaps and compliance requirements for use cases in regulated industries/domains
• Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership (VP/Sr. Director level) shaping AI strategy and influencing key decision-making forums.

What You Must Have

• 8 years of experience in applied ML and AI with at least 3 4 years in enterprise NLP or LLM/SLM system design and deployment.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience with SLMs including fine-tuning and deployment using models such as Phi Gemma Llama Mistral or Qwen families.
• Strong understanding of frontier LLM APIs (OpenAI Azure OpenAI Anthropic) and when they add genuine value over smaller models.
• Experience designing multi-task NLP pipelines covering classification named entity recognition document extraction RAG and reasoning.
• Ability to translate model architecture decisions into cost models and business cases (implementation cost run cost savings ROI).
• Experience with at least one of the following verticals: telecom healthcare or industrial/manufacturing B2B operations.

What is highly desirable

• Experience with automation or workflow orchestration in high-volume operational environments.
• Knowledge of LLMOps practices for SLM deployment including quantization batching model versioning and latency benchmarking.

Key Skills:

ML AI NLP LLM SLM RAG