Senior ML Architect, AI Innovation Lead

Hearst Corporation; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Fitch Group is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Associate Director) to join its AI Innovation Teams in Chicago. The role blends hands-on ML with architectural leadership, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver scalable AI systems for financial analysis.

You'll lead groundbreaking ML initiatives, navigate governance, and work with product and engineering to deploy production-grade AI capabilities, balancing bold experimentation with reliability in a hybrid onsite

Qualifications

• 12+ years building production AI/ML systems.
• Experience designing scalable ML architectures from first principles.
• Hands-on with generative AI, LLMs, RAG, and fine-tuning.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field.
• Cloud platforms and MLOps experience.
• Strong collaboration and communication.

Responsibilities

• Design net-new generative AI solutions and agentic workflows.
• Lead exploration of AI innovations and proofs-of-concept.
• Define ML technical vision and architecture.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with product teams.
• Balance innovation with reliable production deployments.
• Ensure governance and operational excellence.

Skills

12+ years exp

Python

Generative AI

ML frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Airflow

AWS

Job description

Fitch Group is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Associate Director) to join its AI Innovation Teams in Chicago. The role blends hands-on ML with architectural leadership, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver scalable AI systems for financial analysis.

You'll lead groundbreaking ML initiatives, navigate governance, and work with product and engineering to deploy production-grade AI capabilities, balancing bold experimentation with reliability in a hybrid onsite