AI / ML Engineer

AI / ML Engineer – Contract – Culver City, CA – $70-80/hr. The final salary or hourly wage, as applicable, paid to each candidate/applicant for this position is ultimately dependent on a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, the candidate’s/applicant’s qualifications, skills, and level of experience as well as the geographical location of the position. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Sponsorship not available. Our client is seeking an AI / ML Engineer in Culver City, CA. Role Description Own the end-to-end design and delivery of GenAI applications (RAG, orchestration, guardrails, light fine-tuning) alongside classical ML for data mining, building feature/label pipelines, predictive models, and evaluation harnesses that turn raw data into decisions. Bridge product, data, and platform teams to ship secure, scalable systems with solid MLOps, clear metrics, and cost/latency controls. Responsibilities: • Establish dataset quality & governance for ML (profiling, bias/drift checks, lineage, data/model cards, SLAs/SLOs for training-data freshness/completeness) and monitor in production (accuracy/latency/drift/cost with scheduled eval jobs and Prometheus/Grafana). • Design canonical data models and schemas for ML/GenAI (business entities, relationships, data contracts, versioned schemas; star/snowflake where appropriate) aligned with BI and application data. • Build and govern end-to-end ML pipelines covering data prep and feature/label pipelines (time-aware joins, leakage prevention, windowing, feature registries/“feature store” patterns, documentation/reuse), reproducible training (DVC, Makefiles, experiment tracking), model registry & CI/CD (MLflow, GitHub Actions; canary/promote), and fast, cost-efficient inference (batch vs. realtime, caching/batching with FastAPI, Docker, vLLM/Triton), including cost/performance optimization (quantization, batching, context management, token/latency tuning). • Orchestrate LLM tools/agents with built-in safety/guardrails (function calling, retries/fallbacks, guardrails, lightweight state machines; PII redaction, cite-to-answer patterns, policy checks, output validation) in TypeScript or Python. • Turn vague asks into reliable prompts and templates (few-shot sets, thinking steps, tool-use hints, style/voice guidelines). • Connect models to company knowledge with RAG (chunking strategies, embeddings, vector stores like FAISS/pgvector/Pinecone, retrieval tests) using Python and LangChain/LlamaIndex. • Build and maintain high-quality corpora and indices (dedupe, smart splitters, metadata, freshness jobs/ETL, text cleaning/regex). • Collaborate with Legal/InfoSec to define, implement, and audit data privacy and access controls. • Run targeted fine-tunes (LoRA/PEFT) including data curation, supervised runs, and evaluations with PyTorch/TRL and W&B/MLflow. • Make quality measurable (gold sets, rubric scoring, judge models like gEval, pytest-style harnesses, CI quality gates). • Add multimodal capabilities (OCR, captioning, vision Q&A) using Python APIs, ffmpeg, and PIL. • Partner with other teams (such as Sales, Data & BI, Software Engineering, InfoSec, etc.) to develop use cases into technical plans and drive secure, adopted deployments Skills & Requirements • 5+ years as a full-stack AI Engineer, including 2+ years with LLM/GenAI in production in enterprise environments or fast-paced startup cultures • Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript/Node with production code quality (testing, CI, code reviews) • Experience with Modern LLMs (GPT/Claud/Llama), embeddings/tokenization, and prompt design • Experience with RAG fundamentals with LangChain or LlamaIndexz and vector search (FAISS/pgvector/Pinecone) • Experience with fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT/TRL) and experience tracking (W&M or MLflow) • Experience with shipping services with FastAPI/Node, containers/serverless, on a major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) • Privacy & safety experience: PII handling, secrets management, least privilege. • Data modeling & contracts experience: canonical entity models aligned with BI/apps; versioned schemas; strong SQL. • Dataset quality & governance experience: profiling, bias/drift checks, lineage, data/model cards, and SLAs/SLOs for freshness/completeness. • Feature/label pipelines experience: time-aware joins, leakage prevention, windowing, and reuse via feature-store patterns. • Monitoring & reliability experience: track accuracy/latency/drift/cost (Prometheus/Grafana) and run scheduled eval jobs. • Performance & cost awareness experience: batch vs. real-time, caching/batching, context/token management. • Cross-functional experience: communicate with Sales, Data/BI, Eng, and partner with Legal/InfoSec on access controls and compliance Benefits/Other Compensation This position is a contract/temporary role where Hays offers you the opportunity to enroll in full medical benefits, dental benefits, vision benefits, 401K and Life Insurance ($20,000 benefit). Why Hays? You will be working with a professional recruiter who has intimate knowledge of the industry and market trends. Your Hays recruiter will lead you through a thorough screening process in order to understand your skills, experience, needs, and drivers. You will also get support on resume writing, interview tips, and career planning, so when there’s a position you really want, you’re fully prepared to get it. Nervous about an upcoming interview? Unsure how to write a new resume? Visit the Hays Career Advice section to learn top tips to help you stand out from the crowd when job hunting. Hays is committed to building a thriving culture of diversity that embraces people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better we serve our candidates, clients, and employees. We are an equal employment opportunity employer, and we comply with all applicable laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, creed, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), age, national origin or ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, marital status, genetic information, HIV-positive status, as well as any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. One of Hays’ guiding principles is ‘do the right thing’. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. In that regard, we train our staff on ensuring inclusivity throughout the entire recruitment process and counsel our clients on these principles. If you have any questions about Hays or any of our processes, please contact us. In accordance with applicable federal, state, and local law protecting qualified individuals with known disabilities, Hays will attempt to reasonably accommodate those individuals unless doing so would create an undue hardship on the company. Any qualified applicant or consultant with a disability who requires an accommodation in order to perform the essential functions of the job should call or text 813.336.5570. Drug testing may be required; please contact a recruiter for more information.