Senior Consultant, AI/ML Engineer

Hollstadt & Associates; Minnesota; Hybrid; USD 226,367,000 - 252,156,000; Full time

Job summary

Hollstadt Consulting is seeking a Senior ML/AI Engineer to build models, deploy GenAI features, and extend the AI platform. The role blends applied data science with platform engineering across the full stack, from data to production services.

You’ll work remotely on a 9/1/2026 to 2/1/2027 engagement, delivering production-grade ML systems, RAG pipelines, and scalable AI tooling. Strong Python, AWS, and CI/CD experience are essential.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building ML/AI systems in production.
• Strong data science fundamentals: features, metrics.
• Experience ranking/scoring/survival models.
• GenAI/LLM engineering: RAG, embeddings, evaluation.
• Excellent Python for APIs/services.
• AWS Bedrock/SageMaker and container tech.
• CI/CD, testing, and cost-aware deployment.

Responsibilities

• Build ML models and evaluate metrics (AUC, calibration).
• Integrate model output into decision systems.
• Deploy GenAI features: RAG pipelines and agents.
• Extend AI platform gateway and libraries for reuse.
• Own embeddings, vector stores, and retrieval quality.
• Develop evaluation tooling and guardrails for safe rollout.
• Productionize pipelines with cloud services and monitoring.
• Lead technically: set standards and mentor engineers.

Skills

ML systems

Data science

Python

AWS

LLM engineering

CI/CD

Tools

Docker

Git

SageMaker

Bedrock

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Hollstadt Consulting is a management and technology consulting firm dedicated to placing professionals at engagements where they will excel. When you work with us, you'll work with a refreshingly real company led and staffed by seasoned experts who are also down-to-earth, good people. We're committed to treating you with respect and helping you achieve your career aspirations.

Since 1990, Hollstadt has been a trusted partner to more than 150 domestic and global companies and has successfully completed over 3,000 projects. Our continued growth has created challenging and rewarding opportunities for accomplished IT and Business Consultants. Hollstadt Consulting is an equal opportunity employer including disability/veteran.

By applying for this job, you agree to receive calls, AI-generated calls, text messages, or emails from Hollstadt Consulting and its affiliates, and contracted partners. Frequency varies for text messages. Message and data rates may apply. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. You can reply STOP to cancel at any time.

Job Description

Role: Senior Consultant, AI/ML Engineer

Location: Remote

Duration: 9/1/2026-2/1/2027

Rate: $79-$88/hour W2

Description of work / project:

The AI CoE builds AI products and the shared platform that powers them. We're looking for a Senior ML / AI Engineer who is equally comfortable building models and building the platform around them: someone

who can train and evaluate an ML model, ship a production LLM/GenAI application, and extend shared AI infrastructure and tooling that the wider team depends on.

This is a senior builder role at the intersection of applied data science, GenAI application engineering, and AI platform engineering. Our work spans predictive modeling, LLM-based systems, and the platform underneath them; you'll take problems from data and prototype through to governed, monitored production services, and set the technical patterns other engineers build on. Projects vary over time — we value engineers who can move across the stack rather than stay in one lane

Performance expectations:

• Build ML models — frame problems, engineer features, train and evaluate models (ranking, scoring, survival/time-to-event, classification, forecasting), and reason rigorously about metrics (AUC, C-index, calibration), validation strategy, subgroup performance, and failure modes.
• Integrate models into decision systems — combine model output with business/domain rules and LLM reasoning to produce explainable, trustworthy recommendations.
• Ship GenAI applications — design and deploy LLM-powered features: RAG pipelines, agents, structured extraction, summarization, decision-reasoning trails, and evaluation harnesses using Claude/Bedrock and other models.
• Engineer the AI platform — extend the shared AI gateway (unified multi-model access, API keys, per-team budgets, failover, observability) and reusable libraries/SDKs that other teams build on.
• Own the RAG/data layer — embeddings, vector stores, retrieval quality, chunking, and grounding strategies; measure and improve retrieval and answer quality.
• Build evaluation & quality tooling — offline/online eval, LLM-as-judge, regression suites, statistical validation, and guardrails so model and prompt changes ship safely.
• Productionize — wrap models and pipelines as tested, observable services (Python, containers, AWS Lambda/SageMaker/EKS), with monitoring for quality, cost, latency, and drift.
• Lead technically — set patterns and standards, review designs and code, mentor engineers, and partner with data scientists, MLOps, clinical/domain experts, and product owners to move prototypes to production.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping ML / AI systems in production (not just notebooks/POCs), including technical leadership of non-trivial projects.
• Strong data science / ML fundamentals — feature engineering, model training and evaluation, metrics (AUC, C-index, calibration, precision/recall), gradient-boosted trees (XGBoost), and sound experimental methodology (validation strategy, subgroup analysis).
• Experience building ranking, scoring, or survival/time-to-event models, and integrating model output into a larger decision system.
• Hands-on GenAI / LLM engineering — RAG, prompt engineering, function/tool calling, embeddings and vector search, and LLM evaluation.
• Excellent Python — production-grade, tested, well-structured code; comfortable building APIs/services and shared libraries.
• AWS experience — Bedrock and/or SageMaker, Lambda, S3, plus containers (Docker) and Git-based workflows.
• Solid software engineering practice: version control, testing, code review, CI/CD; ability to reason about cost, latency, and reliability of AI systems in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• AI platform engineering — building shared gateways/proxies, model routing, multi-tenancy, quota/budget enforcement, or internal AI SDKs.
• Experience with agent frameworks, real-time/voice AI, or streaming inference.
• Vector databases (Qdrant, OpenSearch, pgvector) and retrieval-quality tuning at scale.
• IaC (Terraform), observability (OpenTelemetry/CloudWatch), and FinOps for AI workloads.
• Healthcare / clinical ML — survival analysis, outcome prediction, or working with clinical/scientific datasets alongside domain experts.
• Serving models as endpoints (SageMaker), cross-account inference, and train/serve parity.
• Experience in a regulated / PHI-handling environment (HIPAA) — data governance, PII handling, auditability.

Hollstadt offers medical, dental, vision, life insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, paid sick leave, and retirement benefits to eligible employees. With three different medical plans to choose from, you can enroll in the coverage you need from individual to family, or anywhere in between!

Remarketing Process

Hollstadt is based on retention and relationships. We get to know your strengths and career wishes throughout your assignment and then start remarket discussions 6-8 weeks prior to your end date. By being proactive, we are able to keep your down time between assignments as short as possible, unless you choose otherwise.

Professional Development

Hollstadt offers on-demand training through our consultant portal. Trainings give our consultants the continuing education they need to excel on their projects. Many of our courses apply towards continuing education credits and we have an entire training hub dedicated to upskilling in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

401k + Matching

One popular benefit is our 401(k) match on the first 4% of your contributions. Hollstadt wants to help you reach your long-term financial goals and understands that planning for your future is critical. Consultants also have access to support from a Financial Advisor.

We appreciate and reward loyalty. Join Hollstadt, stay for 5 years, and we’ll give you a $5,000 Longevity Award bonus! Additionally, we know great talent knows other great talent. If you are on contract with Hollstadt and refer one of your connections who gets placed, we’ll pay you $1,000!

Ongoing Support & Networking

We have made a significant investment in building a support program for our consultant team - so you never have to feel like you are going it alone. We also have a Consultant Coach program which acts like a 'work buddy' to provide a safe ear for questions or concerns at your client site.