Freelance/Contract - Senior AI / ML Engineer (Financial Services)

Role: Senior AI / ML Engineer (Financial Services) Project Duration: Initial 6 Months (Extension highly likely) Location: Remote (U.S. based) – occasional onsite in New York or Boston preferred Start Date: ASAP Language: English Due to federal regulatory requirements related to data access, this position is limited to U.S. citizens. Key Responsibilities: • Develop, deploy, and maintain scalable machine learning models supporting risk analytics, fraud detection, and credit decisioning. • Build reliable data and model pipelines leveraging AWS SageMaker, MLflow, and modern orchestration tools such as Airflow. • Collaborate with engineering, data science, and risk teams to transition models from experimentation to fully productionized systems. • Implement and maintain automated retraining, testing, and validation workflows across ML pipelines. • Contribute to data governance and model traceability standards, ensuring compliance with enterprise and regulatory frameworks (NIST, SOC2, Model Risk Management). • Optimize model performance, latency, and reliability through continuous monitoring and fine-tuning. Requirements: • 7+ years of professional experience in data science, ML engineering, or AI solution development, including 3+ years in production ML deployment. • Strong proficiency in Python and core ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn). • Hands-on experience with MLflow, SageMaker, and Airflow for model management and pipeline automation. • Solid understanding of Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-based compute (AWS preferred; GCP/Azure also valuable). • Familiarity with feature engineering, model versioning, and drift detection processes. • Proven ability to design and deliver ML systems in regulated industries such as banking, payments, or insurance. • Strong collaboration skills and a proactive approach to operationalizing AI safely and efficiently.