Lead AI Systems Engineer - Production ML for Impact

Talentfoot Executive Search; Chevy Chase (MD); On-site; USD 145,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Talentfoot Executive Search is partnering with a nonprofit research and philanthropic institution to stand up a brand-new AI function. You will own the full lifecycle from model selection to deployment and operations, with direct visibility to senior leadership and across administrative and operational functions.

The role carries immediate impact as systems move from idea to production, with a growth trajectory as the team scales and patterns are defined for the function’s expansion.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in software engineering with 3+ years shipping ML/DL systems; 2+ years beyond generative AI.
• Strong proficiency in Java and/or Python.
• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and multi-cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Responsibilities

• Design and build production AI systems within a delivery team to ship collaboratively.
• Choose the right ML approach for each problem and defend it with reasoning.
• Build within reference architectures and share improvements with the team.
• Design evaluation methodology covering precision, recall, calibration, drift, metrics, and A/B testing.
• Own deployment and operations end to end, including CI/CD and observability.
• Handoff to receiving teams with runbooks, docs, and on-call readiness.
• Translate trade-offs to business stakeholders and communicate with engineers.

Skills

Java

Python

Production ML systems

Deep learning

Model evaluation

CI/CD

Infrastructure as code

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

LangGraph/Strands familiarity

Frontend experience (React)

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Vector databases

Retrieval systems

Knowledge graphs

Job description

Talentfoot Executive Search is partnering with a nonprofit research and philanthropic institution to stand up a brand-new AI function. You will own the full lifecycle from model selection to deployment and operations, with direct visibility to senior leadership and across administrative and operational functions.

The role carries immediate impact as systems move from idea to production, with a growth trajectory as the team scales and patterns are defined for the function’s expansion.