Urgent Opening- AI Engineer - Chicago, IL and NYC, NY

Position: AI Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL and NYC, NY

Duration: 6+ Months

Candidate should be local to Chicago or NY and need to work 2-3 days from client's office

Scope of Work

Work with the Lead AI/ML Engineer and business stakeholders to scope, prioritize, and deliver

defined AI initiatives.

Design, build, and deploy AI-powered applications and workflows that improve internal

productivity, decision-making, and operational efficiency.

Develop full-stack solutions, including backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and user-facing

applications.

Develop AI applications powered by commercial foundation models spanning prompt

engineering, agent workflows, and evaluation as well as in-house ML and retrieval systems.

Build, evaluate, and optimize ML models and LLM-powered applications for specific business

use cases.

Build AI-enabled search, retrieval, and knowledge management capabilities using modern

techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Integrate AI capabilities into existing systems and workflows, including tool and data

integrations using standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Document technical designs, deployment procedures, and evaluation approaches so that

delivered systems can be maintained by GTCR s team after the engagement.

Recommend best practices for model evaluation, deployment, and monitoring within the scope

of delivered work.

Experience and Skills

10+ years of experience in Software Engineering with a focus on AI/Machine Learning; prior

contract or consulting engagements a plus.

Bachelor s degree in computer science or equivalent practical experience.

Strong software engineering foundations, including experience building scalable systems and

writing clean, maintainable code.

Experience building production applications that leverage foundation models (e.g., OpenAI,

Anthropic, AWS Bedrock) for language and vision tasks, including RAG, prompt engineering,

agentic workflows, and evaluation.

Experience fine-tuning or training ML models a plus.

Extensive experience programming in Python, leveraging frameworks such as PyTorch and

HuggingFace, and deploying models using cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

Hands-on experience standing up AI/ML systems from scratch e.g., search and retrieval

pipelines, model deployment, and evaluation tooling including setting up tooling and

infrastructure in a greenfield environment.

Ability to translate business requirements into technical designs and to clearly explain technical

concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and deliver against defined

milestones with limited day-to-day oversight.

Experience documenting technical designs and gathering user feedback to iterate on delivered

products.

Portfolio, code samples, or references from prior engagements are welcome.