Sr. Applied AI Engineer

Join phData, a remote-first data and AI consultancy company with employees across the United States, Latin America, and India. We partner with industry leaders, including Snowflake, AWS, Anthropic, Glean, and dbt, to solve the complex data and AI challenges that slow large enterprises.

We're growing fast, and we give our people real ownership over their work. We hire top performers and trust them to deliver results.

Why phData?

• Snowflake Implementation Partner of the Year — 7 consecutive years, and 2026 Snowflake AI Partner of the Year
• AWS Premier Tier Services Partner — the highest tier of recognition in the AWS Partner Network
• 2025 Fivetran Partner of the Year (4th consecutive year)
• 2025 dbt Labs Partner of the Year (3x winner) with Visionary partner status
• 2026 KNIME Customer Excellence Partner of the Year
• Preferred Partner in the Anthropic Claude Partner Network
• #1 Partner in Snowflake Advanced Certifications
• 600+ Expert Cloud Certifications (Sigma, AWS, Azure, Dataiku, and more)
• Recognized as an award-winning workplace in the US, India and LATAM

We are looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to join our Applied AI team. In this role, you will design, build, and operationalize production-ready AI and machine learning systems that deliver measurable business impact for enterprise customers. You will collaborate closely with Applied AI Solutions Architects, data scientists, data engineers, platform engineers, software engineers, and client stakeholders to turn solution designs into reliable implementations. You will help mature our engineering standards and reusable assets so phData can consistently deliver high-quality Applied AI solutions at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and operationalize production-ready Applied AI and machine learning solutions, translating architecture designs and business requirements into clean, maintainable, well-tested code.
• Own the end-to-end implementation of AI applications and workflows across predictive ML, MLOps, generative AI, LLM applications, agentic workflows, and intelligent automation.
• Drive the productionization of AI/ML systems by implementing robust data and model pipelines, deployment and inference patterns, observability, guardrails, and evaluation suites.
• Partner with architects, engineers, and business stakeholders to refine solution designs, clarify requirements, explain technical tradeoffs, and ensure solutions integrate effectively with enterprise data, applications, and workflows.
• Contribute to engineering excellence by troubleshooting complex issues, documenting systems and decisions, and creating reusable accelerators, reference implementations, and delivery playbooks for the Applied AI practice.

About You

You are a technically rigorous problem solver who enjoys building practical, production-ready AI solutions in an outcomes-driven environment. You are comfortable operating in distributed, global teams and partnering with colleagues across time zones.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 5+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, software engineering, data engineering, or a related technical discipline, including at least 3 years designing, building, deploying, or operating AI and machine learning solutions in production.

Technical / Functional Skills

• Strong programming experience in Python and solid working knowledge of SQL for building AI/ML pipelines, services, and applications.
• Proven experience building and productionizing AI/ML systems, including generative AI, LLM-powered applications, predictive ML, or MLOps solutions.
• Hands-on experience developing production software, APIs, services, and data or model pipelines that support training, inference, evaluation, monitoring, and retraining.
• Understanding of production AI/ML concerns such as evaluation, observability, security, governance, scalability, performance, cost optimization, and operational support.
• Experience with modern cloud, data, and AI ecosystems such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, dbt, and contemporary AI frameworks and providers (for example, Anthropic or OpenAI).
• Ability to collaborate and communicate effectively with architects, engineers, data scientists, platform teams, business stakeholders, and client representatives in a consulting or client-facing delivery environment.

Education - If desired

Bachelor's degree in relevant field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

Preferred qualifications help candidates stand out but are not required for success in this role.

• Experience building agentic AI systems, including orchestration, tool use, planning, memory, multi-agent patterns, or protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience designing and deploying enterprise RAG systems, semantic retrieval solutions, AI applications, or intelligent workflow automation.
• Experience with cloud-native AI/ML services such as AWS Bedrock and SageMaker, Azure AI/ML, Google Vertex AI, or Snowflake Cortex, and with LLM orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or comparable tools.
• Experience with model registries, feature stores, data and model lineage, model monitoring, drift detection, AI evaluations, prompt management, AI gateways, and modern DevOps practices (containerization, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, APIs, distributed systems).
• Experience building reusable accelerators, modular architectures, or libraries deployed across multiple clients, plus industry exposure (for example, life sciences, retail, financial services, or manufacturing) or contributions to open-source projects and technical communities.

Why phData?

• Impactful Work: Partner with leading organizations on meaningful data & AI initiatives.
• Collaborative Culture: Work with a supportive, high-performing global team that values transparency, autonomy, and continuous improvement.
• Growth Opportunities: Access to challenging projects, mentorship, and structured development pathways.
• Values-Driven: We prioritize doing the right thing for our clients, our teams, and our community.

Benefits at phData

US:

• Remote-First Work Environment
• 401k plan with company match
• Dental and Vision insurance
• Home Office Equipment Stipend
• Annual stipend for Learning and Development
• Competitive comp, excellent benefits, 4 weeks PTO plan plus 10 Holidays (and other cool perks)

phData celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Our approach helps us to build a winning team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and abilities. So, regardless of how your diversity expresses itself, you can find a home here at phData. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, genetic information, disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. If you would like to request an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at People Operations.